Playing around in the 209-show universe: further thoughts on what to see at this year’s Fringe

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

Take a chance! The 209-show Fringe universe is yours to play around in, starting Thursday. And this is no time to be daunted by the choice. Be tickled instead, and curious. Did you peek at ’s preliminary survey of 13 intriguing prospects? It’s here. And here are some further thoughts about what you might catch.

Making it up as you go along: the Fringe seems to bring out the improviser in theatre artists, and the crazy ambitious (or just plain crazy) in career improvisers. Impossibly inventive forms of “making shit up,” as the Rapid Fire neon-lit mantra has it, are everywhere: murder mysteries, entire musicals, a battle of genres (really, it’s from The Kinkonauts), It’s a town where theatre and improv were always in bed together, and the affair continues at the Fringe. In The Dinner Party, for example, Rapid Fire stars Marg Lawler and Joey Lucius invite special guest improvisers to the dinner table (site of some of theatre’s most traumatizing dramas), to see what happens. In Three Ladies, Belinda Cornish and Jana O’Connor invite a guest for tea and gossip. In Solovela, Miami-based Diane Jorge improvises an entire telenovela, with multiple characters, based on an audience member’s real-life love story.

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Joe Vanderhelm, the agile improviser who introduced audiences to A.I. as a novelty Fringe playwright five summers ago with Plays By Bots — A.I set the stage with an unfinished script and the company improvised the rest — has pivoted, as he says. “The tone” of our interactions with the invading A.I. hordes has changed. With PLAYS BY [BLANKS], Dramatron is unplugged. And, as billed, “humanity has reclaimed the stage.” Vanderhelm and company go a step further, with new scripts (the audience picks from three every show) each written by “an everyday person.”   

“My show is so much about community, in that the format allows me to bring in guests from out of town, so I figured I would look to my community to find potential playwrights,” says the affable Vanderhelm, one of Rapid Fire’s top improvisers.“I recruited my parents, and my sister. My 7-year old daughter teamed up with one of her friends to write one. My goddaughter wrote one. I reached out to teacher pals, and my neighbours down the street,” along with  two members of the Spoken Word Youth Choir.

“Convincing them to write a play wasn’t too hard,” says Vanderhelm, evidently one of world’s most persuasive people. “I took some pressure off them … they don’t have to write a full play, just the first eight or 10 pages, enough to set up who the characters are and for the performers to get what’s going on. The script still runs out partway through and the performers improvise the end. Another pressure I could remove was the need for it to be ‘good’.”

Ron Pederson, Mark Meer, Jacob Banigan in Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Fruit Of Our Purloins. Photo supplied.

And, of course, the ultimate in Fringe-themed improv is back. Die-Nasty’s annual Fringe edition, a nightly serial with its ensemble of deluxe improvisers (plus guests) as Fringe-y characters. And Gordon’s Big Bald Head returns — Jacob Banigan, Mark Meer, Ron Pederson — returns to the Varscona stage, a venerable Fringe tradition directed by “the hand of fate” as billed, in Gordon’s Big Bald Head: The Fruit of Our Purloins. Their crazy ne plus ultra proposition: they’ll improvise their own version of any Fringe show in this year’s 209-show edition. The audience picks the show.   

Wanna simplify your life? Don’t write a new musical and premiere it at the Fringe. Amazingly, lots of artists do, and on a scale — surprisingly big or surprisingly small. Pork & Beans: Attorneys at Law, from Top Bunk Theatre (Soup & Hogan’s 16th Annual Hotdog Eating Contest, Sam’s Clam & Oyster Bar) is one, starring a couple of Harvard classmates-turned ’70s Chicago lawyers. The cast of 10 in Lauren Boyd and Elizabeth Janzen’s production includes the musical’s co-creators Ethan Lang and Sam Daly. The eight-member cast of David Son’s musical comedy A Hellmark Christmas Musical Parody start with heartwarming seasonal magic, a small-town homecoming, a romance rediscovered, etc. And then really really move on, to a dark secret about Christmas spirit. Hey, you can tell it’s fa-la-la-la-la  fare: the warnings include “adult language/content, cartoonish violence, death, drugs, alcohol, gunshots, sexual content, smoke/fog, and violence.”

At the other end of the scale, it might be even trickier to create a two-actor musical. And that’s what Walters and Watt have done with their new sailor-meets-mermaid romance The Shape of Seamen (by Jacquelin Walters, starring Nicole Maloney and Michael Watt). Anna Leslie and Michael Long’s new and evocatively named “light-hearted apocalyptic musical comedy” has an even shorter cast list. The Last 1.5 Librarians North of Lethbridge joins a very exclusive musical theatre subset: librarian characters. But, hey, in an age of book-burning governments they may be the new action heroes.

Not an ensemble player? Working in mysterious ways (like some directors we know)? God is doing two shows at the Fringe, both of them, interestingly, are one-man productions: God! The One-Man Show and God Is A Scottish Drag Queen, the former (by and starring Rich Potter) from New York City, the latter (the latest instalment in His hit series by Mike Delamont) from Lake Country in the Okanagan.

The classics: Shakespeare, who’s an old hand at fringing, is lying pretty low at this year’s edition, save the solo clown show Hereafter (with its clown protagonist modelled after the Gravedigger in Hamlet), and a new comedy/drama Shakespeare’s Judgment Day, involving an action hero who could have played the Melancholy Dane. But the Greeks are here, ready for action. Superfan, a collective creation by the Theatre Network Summer Academy, directed by Nextfest’s irrepressible Ellen Chorley, is a “rock ’n’ roll fuelled retelling” of Euripides’ The Bacchae, set in a 1964 prep school, with Dionysus a hot guitar player. Tiny Bear Jaws’ gore (I want to disappear), by Elena Belyea, is a four-actor version of Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. The Fringe is full of family dysfunction, but hell, in the screwed-up family stakes, The House of Atreus gets a gold star every time.

Welcome home (your green onion cake awaits). Amongst the homecomings at the Fringe, Dammitammy Productions, with a new edition (and cast and orchestrations) of Rebecca Merkley’s delightful Rivercity The Musical, which premiered at the Fringe a decade ago. The characters we know and love from the Archie comic books step brightly forth from Rivercity High on the last day of school, singing (Merkley’s clever musical theatre songs) and dancing and bending the shape of the classic love triangle.

In a fusion of veteran and new young talent that’s pure Fringe, Susan Sneath, who was part of the very first Fringe in 1982, returns to the festival after a 20-year retirement, to co-star (with Mark Guerrero) in Seanchai, a 2024 Gavin Bradley play, and inaugurate a new company, Rua Theatre, that Bradley and Amanda Samuelson have started. All about storytellers and the oral Irish tradition.

A very Fringe irony: Murder Plot, one of Trevor Schmidt’s two new plays premiering at the Fringe premiering at the  Fringe, is about, yes,  a homicide — “six suspects, one detective, no clue.” The Novus Actors are all lawyers and know about such things.

And consider this option, a bargain at the price: a bunch of your favourite Fringe performers in one show, different every performance. Story Story Lie, from Winnipeg’s Tits Up Productions, gathers a trio of top-of-the-galaxy Fringe stars and they tell unbelievable stories. Two are true and one is a lie. You can ask questions, and the first to spot the liar wins.

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