The Story An Italian raised in Texas decides to stake a claim in New York City show business. Since she needs to work while awaiting her big break, she lands a job as manager of a high-end steak house, providing the fodder for Carolann Valentino’s first-class, true-life, one-woman musical about following your dreams and the idiots who clutter the highway between you and your goal.
Pros Valentino, a firecracker of a performer, sinks her teeth into the audience as though it were a prime rib steak and never lets go. Her parade of characters – a ditzy hostess, obnoxious customers, a clueless fellow manager – are boldly delineated, and you feel as though you’ve been given a ringside seat in this restaurant where dysfunctional humanity is the main course. Valentino also serves up terrific songs including a funny and lewd variation on Moon River.
Cons What there are don’t matter.
Verdict Delicious.

Burnt at the Steak

Carolann Valentino Productions, New York City
Academic Hall

The Story :  Playwright Jayson McDonald tackles identity, privacy and societal disintegration with this sci-fi police story for two actors. He also frequently waxes poetic, a less than desirable move. Without revealing too much of the interminable plot, the story takes place at some future time when a virus has given people the mental ability to share memories. That’s helpful when a constable who’s particularly proficient at rummaging through the heads of others (all played by the second actor) goes searching for a missing woman. If you attend the show, you’ll learn the outcome.

Pros :  With the current flap about police access to our private digital lives, McDonald may have hit a topical nerve. There’s also some fun speculation about accessing memories of events that have not yet happened.

Cons:   The script comes off as prime-time television fare, and the actors aren’t up to the demands of their roles.

Verdict A case of unfulfilled potential.

The City That Eats You

Squirrels at War, London, Ont.

Arts Court Library

Women Who Shout at the Stars written and performed by Carolyn Heatherington, directed by Kathryn Mackay, dramaturgy by Judith Thompson.

Heatherington’s reminiscences are a not to be missed emersion in the distance past of the 1930s.  The characters of her mother Gwen and childhood nannie Edie float across a landscape ravaged by war and lost loves in which the lovely and vulnerable Heatherington was as often her mother’s savior as her child.  Sensitively written by Heatherington, the play allows a daughter to speak for her mother, and make peace with her, while never becoming sentimental. Shaped by bold choices these are women who courageously embrace the consequences of those choices. Heatherington’s performance is by turns gentle, then swift and sharp, but always imbued with humour, and the portraits are unforgettable.  – Snapshot on the Fringe by Laurie Fyffe

Plays at the Leonard Beaulne Studio.

Howard Petrick is not a trained actor but he is a living piece of history, an honest to goodness hippy /hobo from San Francisco and Mineapolis, who comes out of the left wing labour movement and is transformed into an anti Viet-nam War activist in 1960’s. No set (a chair and some lights) no costume, no props, no esthetic theatrical set up, just Petrick in all his earnest feeling, vast experience as a speaker for the union movement with all his stories, which pour out of his mind non stop for an hour. He rode the rails, he hopped the freight cars, he looked for work throughout the US and ended up with a vivid story of a monstrous wrestling match which tops of all his tales, all of which are all based on real experience. His stories also paint a gallery of characters with colourful names, itinerant men who created a sub culture of out of work men, forced to move around to find a job . Some reach the point where this kind of moving about becomes a style of life that they can’t or don’t want to change. It’s a fascinating portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s and all the more interesting because it is based on authentic experience.

This show is a  prequel to his earlier show Breaking Rank, where he tells us how he was drafted into the American army and continued protesting even when he was a soldier in Viet-nam.

Never Own anything you have to paint or feed

Written and performed by Howard Petrick

Plays at Studio Leonard Beaulne

No doubt that Alexander Gibson is an effective story teller especially where it comes to his own personal experience but I think this show is mainly about his experiences as a first time elementary school teacher and the obstacles he had to overcome. It is not about teaching French. So don’t be confused. In fact I wish his one man performance had erased all the references to teaching French and just chosen to tell us about  the character’s  experiences with  these children who are funny and disruptive and who constantly challenge him, as the ghost of his mother intervenes in his head and keeps telling him how to deal with it all

What was very distasteful for me was his relationship with the material he was supposed to be teaching. It showed first of all that the character  knows nothing about “second” language teaching. Evan at that early age there are pedagogical techniques that have to be mastered and there is a minimum level of linguistic competence one would expect from a teacher so that he does not ruin the poor sensitive ears of the little ones. At that age they pick up sounds, pronunciation, rhythms and accents so easily. Plus the fact that the story-line  emphasized the negative reactions of his class, which shows no doubt that the teacher  was not doing it properly. I could go into much detail but there is no point. Maybe a show of this kind would fly in a place where there are no francophones around but in Ottawa it is almost an insult to the attempts of serious French teachers who are dedicated to French Immersion, even if the children are very young. Not knowing what you are doing is not funny. its sad!  The  mimicry is fine but there is  something naive and childish about this performance that shows us why it missed the point.

Plays in the Arts Court Library. This year that venue has been rearranged so that we can actually see the performance space beyond the third row. Good job Fringe.