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Striking the beer tent >> It's all over except for the remounts by AMY BARRATT
The major surprise of the evening was that despite topping the list for ticket sales, The Full Molly didn't win the Centaur-sponsored "people's choice" award for best production. That honour went to the also very well-attended Stay Black and Die, a one-woman show from Anchorage, Alaska. The fact that early in the week this company started handing out blank ballots to departing audience members after each performance was really just good business sense. Written and performed by Addena Sumter-Freitag, Stay Black and Die wasn't quite as good as all the guilty white superlatives would suggest, but it's as deserving as anything else at the Fringe of a week-long run at Centaur. I also enjoyed Susan Jeremy's show, Was That My 15 Minutes? What's troubling about her win for best comedy is that even though the three judges ran around seeing dozens of shows, everyone "knew" the New Yorker was a shoo-in. Just for Laughs bigwigs swore she wasn't parachuted in, but Jeremy herself was clear that she was only doing our Fringe in hopes of being picked up by the comedy fest. It's a troubling precedent. How do we keep future Fringes from becoming buzzing hives of comedy fest wannabes? Donald Woo of Plop@Fleck is a wonderfully oddball writer and definitely deserving of the best text award from Playwrights' Workshop and Chapters. If that wasn't screamingly obvious in this production, it may be because Plop@Fleck is actually four short plays, without a strong unifying element, stuck together to make up an hour-long show. Each of the four was a little gem, however, and the third, about very young Canadian soldiers on the Belgian front in World War I could, I think, be expanded into a devastating one-act. The Frankie awards ceremony was short and sweet at about an hour, but whose idea was it to start it at 8 p.m., before the fest was even over? At least eight companies still had performances to do during or after the ceremony. Whether you won anything or not, imagine how distracting that would be. Say you're Brandy Yanchyk of Everyone Wants to Be Mary Magdalene. Your last performance is scheduled for 10:45 p.m. on Sunday. If you win an award, your house will be packed; if you don't, it will be virtually deserted, especially since extra performances of the "popular" shows have been added in direct competition with you. Either way, it's murder on your concentration. Next year, the last performances should be at around 8 p.m. and the awards should be scheduled for 9 p.m., and actually start at 9:30 p.m. Makes for tight newspaper deadlines but what the hell. And speaking of Brandy, she's the find of the festival as far as I'm concerned. While reaction to her show wasn't unmixed, at least it was never lukewarm. It was interesting how many of the comments posted in the beer tent were addressed directly to Brandy. Somehow, after watching Ms. Y on stage for an hour, people felt they knew her. She has that kind of presence. Mary Magdalene is essentially a one-woman show, although there is an ever-present stage manager character, played by stage manager Lisa Levack. Brilliant direction--dramaturgy really--by Cristina Iovita showcased the young performer/playwright's talent and technique. Yanchyk plays Mary, an actress preparing to go onstage, and several other characters including a school counselor who is concerned that a "dark side" has shown up in the young Mary's writing assignments, and a camp leader, Judy, who encourages her to follow her dreams. These characterizations may be "over the top," as one of my colleagues suggested, but better that than the tentative, tepid acting I see all too much of. Maybe in this case it's not the acting that's too big but the house that's too small. Part of the problem with Brandy's show is that it wasn't billed as a comedy. This Concordia theatre student at times reminded me of Sherry Glaser, the comedienne whose Family Secrets has played Montreal twice, and whose new show Oh My Goddess is coming to this summer's comedy festival. Like Glaser, Brandy takes some fairly tragic subject matter (a bit about young women starving themselves to feel attractive, say, or about doctors prescribing Prozac to the same demographic as if it were Trident) and exaggerates it until we have to laugh. So, is Everyone Wants to Be Mary Magdalene somewhat autobiographical? Sure, says Yanchyk. If that makes her work self-indulgent as some have suggested, I guess she can get in line with everyone from Sherry Glaser to Eugene O'Neill. >>> Get thee down to Galerie Isart (263 St. Antoine W.) tonight at 7 p.m., or just switch on CKUT (90.3 FM) for the live radio broadcast of a show called Solo, featuring mainly monologues by such local writer-performers as Abla Farhoud, Janis Kirshner, Laura Mitchell, Ann Lambert, Mitsiko Miller, SkidMore and William Young. Estelle Rosen hosts.
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At the first annual Fringe awards last Sunday night, the organizers seemed to have gone out of their way to kill the suspense--first by putting several of the not-yet-winning acts on the bill for the awards ceremony, and then by scheduling extra performances of at least two of the about-to-win shows for later that night. Plus, before Susan Jeremy's name was called as winner in the best comedy category, she could be seen standing behind the curtain ready to come on.