Best Picture
RibbitRePublic (Jersey City, N.J.), Studio Léonard-Beaulne
It’s a near-breathless sprint, but they get it done: Jon Paterson, Kurt Fitzpatrick and Rachel Kent lampoon every Best Picture Oscar winner ever (80, if you’re counting) by enacting a mashed up excerpt or at least injecting a title into the show’s brisk dialogue. Part of the fun is guessing the name of the movie, say, How Green Was My Valley (1941) or Ordinary People (1980), before it’s spoken. Equally entertaining is how the trio segues from one film to the next or chucks a couple of movies into the verbal Mixmaster so that The Hunchback of Notre Dame suddenly appears aboard the 1935 version of Mutiny on the Bounty (you do know the connection between the two films, don’t you?). The show sometimes bogs down under its own cleverness, but it still manages to emerge as the kind of bright-eyed performance with zero social value that you’d find only at a fringe festival.

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Lovely Lady Lump,
Lana Schwarcz (Melbourne, Australia)
Arts Court Theatre
Lana Schwarcz is a stand-up comic, so it’s not surprising that her solo, autobiographical show about breast cancer is a comedy. She tells jokes to an unseen radiation technologist during treatments. A flakey art therapist for cancer patients gets spoofed. Cancer itself is pilloried when Schwarcz, reversing roles by embodying the disease, depicts it as a second-rate performer in a comedy club who tells jokes like, “When I was a kid, I was really good at hide-and-seek. Sometimes people didn’t find me for years.” Schwacrz is open about herself, revisiting the terrible moment when she got her diagnosis, exploring how disease can threaten your self-identity by turning you into a body part, and then putting that part in the context of a whole person by baring her breasts on stage as she re-enacts the endless radiation sessions. Many have found the show at once hilarious and tear-provoking. Finding it neither, your reviewer mostly hoped it would end soon. You decide for yourself.

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Black Sheep Theatre (Ottawa), The Courtroom
It sounds like an idyllic spot, but Magic Unicorn Island is in fact a refuge about to confront its nemesis: The United Empire. How did the island, a Pacific Ocean home to one million children, get into this position? To answer that, writer/performer Jayson McDonald starts at the beginning — literally. His exceedingly dark-humoured solo show opens with a dude-like God fashioning the galaxy, cycles through millennia of human conflict, and winds up in some distant and ravaged future where the children of the world, led by a precocious and earnest 14-year-old named Shane, establish their own colony on a previously undiscovered island. McDonald’s cautionary tale includes a bunch of other characters including the Empire’s conniving leader, a front-porch philosopher, and a father who spews hatred toward every human including himself. Furious, entertaining and imaginative in accepted McDonald fashion, Magic Unicorn Island is named for a mythic creature, but its lesson is disquietingly realistic. …

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(Ottawa), Arts Court Theatre
War turns the world upside down, causing language to lose its meaning, relationships to be fraught, the grotesque to become the normal. Simon L. Lalande and Danielle LeSaux-Farmer, this cabaret-style show’s writers and principal performers, explore such outcomes of armed conflict in a production that’s long on concept but short on clarity, tension and other elements essential to maintaining our interest. LeSaux-Farmer plays a war correspondent whose encounter with destruction drives her into her own head where memories of remembered happier times play in near-constant performance. Lalande is an angel from Hell (whatever that is), a cabaret performer and other characters. There’s lots of physicality, two on-stage musical accompanists, and frequently baffling leaps in time, place and rationale as the playwrights pile one thing on top of another. That the show lacks structure was cringingly apparent when it concluded in such uncertain fashion that Lalande felt compelled to say to the audience: “The end.” It was indeed. …

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Aplombusrhombus (Ottawa), Academic Hall
An early contender for one of the best shows at this year’s Fringe, Cardinal is a powerfully affecting, clown-based journey into Alzheimer’s disease. Mitchel Rose and Madeleine Hall, dressed in red and white respectively, use just six chairs, a couple of flats and their own bodies to depict an intimate battle between memory and disease. Alzheimer’s being a vicious disrupter of communication, the two speak not a word as they track the confusion, fear and sometimes brief, liberating joy that mark memory’s confrontation with a sly, self-satisfied disease that cunningly builds a kind of symbiosis with its victim. At one point, the two opponents use the chairs as pieces in a game of checkers. You keep hoping that memory will win even though you know how this one is going to go. The show is compassionate, insightful and sometimes very funny as it tries to laugh valiantly at the disease. Most importantly, it’s true.

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Concrete Drops (Brooklyn, N.Y.), The Courtroom

Credulity meets manipulation in this gripping, twist-and-turn of a two-hander by fringe favourite Martin Dockery. He plays a lost, naïve soul attempting to record a demo CD by a beautiful, rich songstress played by Vanessa Quesnelle. They squabble, drink, draw closer together, move apart as it slowly becomes clear that there’s more of a back story here than first appeared. To say much more would be to say too much, but the back story soon becomes front and centre as events grow darker and the characters – finely drawn by Dockery and compellingly embodied by both actors – slowly open up before us. That Dockery and Quesnelle are married in real life adds another dimension to the drama and heightens its intimate, almost voyeuristic air. This production marks the Canadian premiere of Love is a Battlefield, which is a welcome addition to Dockery’s canon. …

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TWA (Third Wall Academy, Ottawa), Academic Hall

Kill someone when you’re 14 years old, and your own life – likely now one of crippling self-hatred, anger and isolation — is in many ways over. Back up a bit to see why you committed the act and you’ll probably find it was almost predestined by events over which you had no control. That’s pretty much the case of Ivory Coast-born Kojo (Patrick Bugby), a child soldier and orphan who becomes a refugee among other abandoned child refugees (eight other student actors playing multiple roles) and who sees his own life, once a joyful thing of family and tall trees and potential, shrink to almost nothing. The script by British playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan is powerful, its execution by this ensemble of under-20 performers mostly well-oiled and passionate. There are problems – characters are not always developed; the high-pitched screams of one actor are painful overkill – but under director James Richardson, Fugee speaks to the heart. …

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Doctor Keir Co (Montreal), Studio Léonard-Beaulne

Just when you thought the question about whether Shakespeare actually wrote Shakespeare was one of those arcane discussions that had finally been consigned to the dumpster of literary history, Keir Cutler raises it again in this lecture-style, partly autobiographical and largely uninspiring comedy. Turns out that the contrarian Cutler’s interest in disputing Shakespeare’s authorship of all those works (he does marshal some enticing arguments for his position) is at heart a rallying cry for independent thinking in the face of smug, conformity-loving academics who simply squelch any discussion of uncomfortable questions like the authorship one. The show has a undisciplined feel, including an extraneous homage to his bright, ambitious parents and an account of how, on the path to a PhD, Cutler discovered that he’d score top marks only by parroting back to professors their own opinions. I don’t know about you, but my own, extended university experience completely contradicts the latter. This show is Cutler’s eighth Ottawa Fringe appearance. …

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