Are you lost in the stars? What to see at Fringe Full Of Stars: a little survey to get you started

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Starting Thursday, Edmonton’s best idea ever is back in action to screw up your bedtime, and make life more exciting. The 44th annual edition of our 11 day-and-night theatre bash, the biggest and oldest Fringe on the continent, and the place where the phenom started on this side of the pond, is an invitation to experiment, take a chance, make a discovery.

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The starry 223-show Fringe galaxy is yours to explore Aug. 14 to 24. So what looks promising? intriguing? Just for starters, here’s a preliminary survey of a dozen shows that caught my eye — for the play, the premise, the artists, the weirdness and/or the likelihood you’ve never seen anything like it. (I haven’t seen them yet either, so we’re in this together). Stay tuned for companion pieces, and more suggestions, coming up on .ca.

Victor and Victoria’s Terrifying Tale of Terrible Things. This cleverly macabre homage to Victorian bedtime storytelling, and the irresistible lure of getting scared, is an original by actor/playwrights Beth Graham and Nathan Cuckow. It premiered nearly 15 years ago at the Fringe here and in New York. It’s back, with a pair of this theatre town’s hottest young actors, Rain Matkin and Eli Yaschuk, and marks the return the of star director Jim Guedo to the Fringe — after 35 years. “It would take a lot to lure me back,” says Guedo of his return to the Fringe after lo these many years. Last time was as an actor: Leave It To Jane’s 1990 production of Charles Ludlum’s Medea, with Maralyn Ryan, directed by Tim Ryan.

The appeal for Guedo was double-barrelled. One was the actors. “Rain and Eli asked me, I happen to think they’re both fabulous,” Guedo says of the pair of recent MacEwan Theatre Arts grads who starred together in Northern Light’s Radiant Vermin this past season. “This will be our fourth show working together,” Guedo says of a history that includes MacEwan’s production of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park With George (Matkin and Yaschuk were Dot and George). “Two: the script. Beth and Nathan’s script is a bang-up beautiful piece of writing. It’s marvellous, twisted, dark, funny, and is a dense rollercoaster to navigate…. We’ve had a blast working on it.”

Bomb, starring Mariya Khomutova. Pyretic Productions. Poster by Amelia Scott.

Bomb. Pyretic Productions, a local indie with a national profile, has a history with our Fringe they can trace back to Matthew MacKenzie’s The Particulars in 2008. And an archive of originals that leans into bold and inflammatory (Bears, Alina, Michael Mysterious, Barvinok …). With this Canadian premiere of Bomb, a (very) black absurdist comedy by Natalia Blok billed as “explosively funny” (with a bomb to back up that claim), Pyretic introduces us to contemporary Ukrainian theatre. And director Lianna Makuch has assembled an all-star cast of heavy-hitters for the occasion: Mariya Khomutova, James MacDonald, Geoffrey Simon Brown, Anna Kuman. More about this play in a companion piece coming soon.

The Peter Pan Cometh. If you were surprised (and who wasn’t?) by Who’s Afraid of Winnie the Pooh? at last summer’s Fringe, you already know something about the playful audacity at work in Clevername Theater of Minnesota. Somehow, impossibly, they pulled off a funny and very moving capture of Edward Albee’s celebrated barb-slinging marital bloodbath with the AA Milne characters from the Hundred Acre Wood. You can’t help but be curious about this latest from playwright Alexander Gerchak, in which the illusion-soaked barflies of Eugene O’Neill’s monumentally bleak The Iceman Cometh, are visited by The Boy Who Refuses To Grow Up et al. Sounds even more impossible.

Cadaver Synod by Sebastian Ley, Vault Theatre. Poster image supplied

Cadaver Synod. Sebastian Ley’s 638 Ways To Kill Castro, a smart satire with a zest for the absurdist potential of … reality, was our introduction at last summer’s Fringe to the accomplished work of this theatrically savvy young actor/playwright. His first play, it was a hit. Ley is back with another equally outlandish premise from actual history: an obsessed medieval emperor with, as Ley puts it dryly, “a high level of inability to let things go,” orders the body of a long-dead pope who’s offended him to be dug up. In 897, the corpse is put on trial. Kathleen Weiss, a director with experimental cred, returns, to direct a starry cast that includes Samuel Bronson, David Ley, and Michael Watt. More about the playwright and his new play in an upcoming post.

Zombies, Inc, Live & In Color. Poster image supplied

ZOMBIES, INC. The intriguing proposition at the heart of this new solo musical comedy is alluringly off-centre: “what if you were already living like the undead before the zombie apocalypse? Satirical barbs aimed at “corporate culture, capitalism, existential dread … through the lens a zombie apocalypse” as director Devanand Janki describes? OK, I’m in. The show was developed by Live & In Color, the New York company started by the Edmonton born and raised New Yorker Janki to champion the work of under-represented and BIPOC artists. His musical adaptation (with Tommy Newman) of Darrin Hagen’s Yuletide comedy With Bells On premiered at Theatre Network in 2023. Janki directs this new musical created by the Bolivian-American artist Marcus Perkins Bejarano and Korean-Mongolian Kim Jinhyoung and starring Edmonton’s Damon Pitcher, “a local gem and a star in the making” as Janki describes. “A true tour-de-force performance” by “a fellow South Asian artist…. Directing Damon has been a deeply personal joy.” Janki says. OK, I’m in.

The Alberta Hospital For The Insane by Calla Wright. Photo supplied.

The Alberta Hospital for the Insane. They’ve included puppets in their Fringe casts before now (The Wright Sisters Present: The Wright Brothers , e.g.) In May I saw a workshop production of Calla Wright’s Binding, a witty, highly original one-human many-puppet character play at the RISER New Works Festival. And here’s a Wright Punch and Judy-style puppet show, Wright’s first with an all-puppet cast, directed by the adventurous theatre artist Meegan Sweet. The puppets have the intriguing challenge of stepping up to thorny, complex subject matter … the relationship between queer and trans identities, gender roles, the social weaponizing of the mental illness label. It’s set in dustbowl Alberta in the 1930s at the notorious Alberta Hospital in Ponoka. Why puppets? “A lot of the play is about perception, and the cognitive dissonance between how you feel within and how you’re perceived by others,” Wright says. “And puppets help us play with this reality/unreality truth/mask theme.”

Rat Academy 2: Gnaw and Order. Three years ago, Fringe audiences were smitten by the fractious dynamic between a couple of rats, marginalized outsiders up against it in a rat-free province. Rat Academy, the imaginative and playful work of clown artists Dayna Lea Hoffmann and Katie Yoner, went on to tour theatres and festivals across the country, a bona fide hit and Edmonton Fringe success story. Fingers (Hoffmann), the exasperated street-wise one, and Shrimp (Yoner), a former lab rat and the more naive and impulsive one, are back, with a free-standing ‘sequel’. This time, as their creators said in a interview for their Nextfest run, the rodent duo, quick on the uptake with their audiences, have been evicted from their alley and are exploring the notion of home, what it means to be at home.

Christine Lesiak and Louise Casemore in Lost Sock Rescue Society, Small Matters Productions. Photo supplied.

Lost Sock Rescue Society. The prospect of a new show from Small Matters Productions, purveyors of such clownly comic delights as For Science! and The Spinsters, is no small matter at all. In this one you get to support the vital activism of a society with a mission to recover, rehabilitate, and re-home lost, unwanted, and abandoned socks. Not only that, you can apply to adopt. The production introduces as new stage partnership, and the kooky fun potential is high: Christine Lesiak (Hey Science!) and Louise Casemore (OCD, Gemini), the latter fresh from a sold-out premiere run of Lucky Charm at the Found Festival, and both experts at making audience interaction actually fun! (a gift to be prized). Unlike Lesiak Casemore isn’t known as a clown artist per se. “But aesthetically and philosophically, we’re on the same page!” as Lesiak puts it. There’s a guest “international sock technician” at every performance.

Final Girl: A New Musical. A new musical comedy by the Straight Edge Theatre team of Seth Gilfillan and Stephen Allred, the musical theatre-soaked duo who brought us Conjoined and Krampus, is an enticing prospect. Billed as “Scream meets Mean Girls,” their new show is named for the teen horror flick trope of, you know, cheery serial slasher deaths.

Dave Clarke and John Ullyatt in ShipShow, Photo supplied.

ShipShow! Together again. Even the thought of Dave Clarke and John Ullyatt, two of this town’s most adventurous theatre artists, as a musical cabaret duo in nautical mode, taking on the curse of the Flying Dutchman, is pretty well irresistible. Eileen Sproule directs. (Memories do linger of their Dr. Grot and Moon shows of yore: Clarke as a demented self-help guru and Ullyatt as a slightly rancid eager-beaver boy scout acolyte. Once seen never forgotten).

Trevor Schmidt and Jake Takaczyk in Flora and Fawna Face Their Fears, Guys in Disguise. Photo supplied

Flora & Fawna Face Their Fears. The NaturElles, the all-inclusive non-binary pre-teen collective (founded by two earnest 10-year-old girls as a haven for bullied outsiders (no mean girls!), were born at the Fringe a decade ago. They’re the comedy inspiration of Guys in Disguise’s Darrin Hagen and Trevor Schmidt, who co-starred (with Brian Dooley) in the inaugural Flora & Fawna’s Field Trip (With Fleurette), a NaturElles recruitment seminar, a decade ago. “Trevor and I came up with the character names when we were up north in 2013 in the Yukon researching Klondykes,” says Hagen. “One of us said ohmygod there’s so much flora and fauna up here. And the other said those would be great character names.” Flora & Fawna Have Beaver Fever (And So Does Fleurette) followed. I can’t not see the latest show: Schmidt as Fawna, Jake Tkaczyk as Flora, and Jason Hardwick as the NaturElles new secretary.

Jezec Sanders in Where Foxes Lie, Nextfest and Ready Go Theatre. Photo supplied.

Where Foxes Lie. Fringe audiences found out about playwright Jezec Sanders with an impressively accomplished and witty thriller The Cabin on Bald Dune in 2023. This new solo show, is similarly intricate (I saw a workshop version a year ago at Nextfest, a co-producer at the Fringe premiere with Ready Go Theatre), and just as challenging, since the dark unstoppable course of a rumour in a community is chronicled onstage by one actor. Sanders himself stars; Erik Richards directs.

Before this gets any longer, I leave you, just temporarily, with some enticing premises: A Kind of Electra, a clown version of the violent Greek myth by L.A.’s The Clown School Company. The Empire of Sand, a new show, would you call it “performance poetry”?,  featuring the verbal gymnastics of Steve Pirot. Riot! something new from the ingenious theatrical smarties of Vancouver’s Monster Theatre. It involves an actual 1849 theatre riot in NYC. 

Tickets, show descriptions and schedules: fringetheatre.ca.