by AMY BARRATT

The Montreal Fringe Festival is 13 years old and gets underway on Friday the 13th. Accordingly, the Fringe program has been given a spooky, horror-film feel. Still, if the Fringe-for-all previews are any indication, this year’s fest is going to be less about creepy crawlies and more about nudie booty. Yesindeedy, Fringe 13 is not only bigger than ever—with a total of 81 shows in 10 venues—it’s also more scantily clad!

It almost goes without saying that Shakti will be here; her latest spiritual-erotic dance routine is called The Pillow Book. New this year is that she’s bringing a busload of shows, many from her native Japan, with her under the rubric of The Garage International.

It has been said of the J-Boys’ Gay Samurai Revue (on the cover) that it “can’t make up its mind whether it is art or porn.” It promises to be a camp blend of music, dance and thongs, of particular interest to gay men, but everyone is welcome.

B FOR BUZZ

The Fringe festivities begin tonight, Thursday, June 12, at 8 p.m., in the beer tent—once again located in Parc des Amériques (corner of Rachel and St-Laurent)—with a party featuring the Snitches. The beer tent is also where you’ll find the box office and the buzz—a wall of paper containing audience reviews of the shows. It takes a couple of days for the buzz to reach critical mass, but once it does, it’s the best place to go for tips on what to see and what to avoid.

Theatre performances, all of which cost $9 or less, begin at 6 p.m. on June 13, and continue every day through Sunday the 22nd. As well, there are plenty of special events at the park and elsewhere. The hugely popular Drag Races, in which novice drag queens vie to apply the best make-up, mix the best drink and complete an obstacle course in high heels, are back. Mistress of ceremonies is the fabulous Mado Lamotte.

The On-the-Spot improv troupe, also celebrating its 13th anniversary this year, performs at Centaur theatre on Friday the 13th at 8 p.m. Infinitheatre’s annual Midsummer Night’s Cabaret is on Friday the 20th at the Bain St-Michel. It’s a karaoke party with all proceeds going—so the Fringe program says—towards “the commissioning of a new Quebec lay.” But I think they mean “play.”

There are many familiar faces among this year’s performers. Job II: The Demon of the Eternal Recurrence is, of course, the sequel to last year’s revelatory Job: The Hip-Hop Musical. Although it picks up where the first one left off, this show isn’t really about Job at all. Jerome Saibil and Eli Batalion do however reprise their MC Cain and MC Abel characters and the rather complicated-sounding plot does still revolve around the corporate world of fictional hip hop label Hoover Records.

Montrealer Keir Cutler knows a winning formula when he finds one. The writer-performer of a Fringe series that began with Teaching Shakespeare returns this year with Teaching Witchcraft. Actually, despite the similar title, this latest show looks to stray quite a bit from the formula. Although Witchcraft is a monologue, Cutler does not appear as his familiar professor character, but rather as a 15th-century inquisitor.

QUICK, A MALE!

An interesting development in Fringe ’03: Sarah Quick appears on stage with a man! Fringers have grown accustomed to seeing Quick in two-woman pieces like Thanks for the Mammaries and Sex and Sensibility. In Home to Roost, she teams up with James Barrett to search for the meaning of life as She and He.

Saint TJ Dawe, who can do no wrong, has another one-man show in this Fringe, and is also involved with two other shows. After last year’s foray into adaptation with Tracks, based on the early writings of Jack London, Dawe returns to the winning formula of mining his own itinerant lifestyle for monologue material. A Canadian Bartender at Butlin’s draws on his experience pouring pints at a resort for British white trash.

TJ is also the co-writer of The Power of Ignorance, starring Chris Gibbs, and he directed and helped develop The One Man Star Wars Trilogy.

In past years, Mary Fulham co-wrote and directed two one-woman shows starring Susan Jeremy, including the brilliant P.S. 69. Fulham appears in person this year with two other actors in Devotion, which she also wrote and directed. It’s about the seething underbelly of a Boston Catholic family.

FRINGE CONCENTRATE

• The Acting Project, which made its debut at last year’s Fringe with the highly entertaining Ricardo Jamon: Mastermentalist, returns this year with Isla Xoox-imictlan: An Aztec Fantasy, written and directed by Andrés Hausmann.

• The 10-woman Solid State Breakdance Collective bring on another dose of their phenomenal energy and talent in Etch-A-Sketch.

• The creators of last year’s award-winning The Canada Show are back with a condensed history of the world, The Big Rock Show.

• Performance poet Jem Rolls got great buzz last year, and he joins us again, all the way from Scotland.

• Village Scene Productions, which was responsible for last year’s Mauvais Match, continues to explore gay characters and themes in two short plays set in the Dirty ’30s: Come Clean and Exploration.

• Tim Mooney returns to the Fringe as the brightest light of French theatre in Molière Than Thou.

• Fringe 2003 also boasts a healthy dose of Shakespeare. There are two, count ’em, two Hamlets: a physical theatre one from Santa Barbara featuring five performers, and a one-man version from B.C. that includes puppetry. Shakespeare is also the jumping-off point for Théâtre du cloître’s Richard III ou la chute du Corbeau. If all that’s not enough culture for you, you might have to check out British comic Rainer Hersch’s All Classical Music Explained.

• For those who like their fanaticism a little more contemporary, there are two Star Wars-based shows. The aforementioned One Man Star Wars Trilogy is performed by Charles Ross of B.C. Montrealers Purple Nine Productions (last year’s Cobra: The Musical) combine two pop culture phenomena in Star Wars Survivor.

• One final recommendation: Why not check out new company Salvaging Curiosity in No Cycle, by Harry Standjofski. I will, on the other hand, be trying to avoid something called Sluts Are Only Human—but that’s just me.

The Fringe opens tonight, June 12, in the beer tent (corner of St-Laurent and Rachel) with a party featuring The Snitches. Live shows kick off tomorrow, June 13 and continue through Sunday, June 22, with the Frankie Award ceremony. Info: 849-FEST or www.montrealfringe.ca

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