Singing and dancing with ghosts: a haunted, and haunting, musical: Ghost Quartet. A Fringe review

Ghost Quartet (stage 36, ArtsHub Ortona)

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

This haunted, and haunting, musical invites us into an atmospheric lamp-lit bar under a spacious vault (the venue, as arranged by director/designer Jim Guedo is just right) where whiskey gets drunk, eerie stories get told, dances get danced, and songs get sung.

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The latter are by Dave Malloy the highly original New York creator of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. And they’re kind of ethereal and kind of earthy at the same time, in an assortment of styles, jazz, folk, Celtic-flavoured rock. In Guedo’s atmospheric production they’re delivered by four actors in motion — Ashlin Turcotte, Ethan Bintu-Watt, Lisa Kotelniski, Matthew Gregg — who sing and turn their hand to assorted instruments — piano, autoharp, xylophone, drums, accordian.

There isn’t one single narrative: ghost stories, tales from Sheherazade, myths, folk tales, snapshots of New York … start and float away, open-ended. Two sisters, Rose and Pearl (Kotelniski and Turcotte) recur, and have their doubts whether they’re alive or dead, in the present or the past. You know that feeling? “I don’t know if this is me or just some ghost of me,” the sisters who don’t yet know they’re sisters sing at the outset, in a camera shop. “Now I don’t know but I’ve been told and that’s true of everything I think I know….”

Time passes, centuries maybe, and the image of photographyt, taking a photo at the end of the world, recurs at the end of the four sided, multi-track show.  As one of the sisters says, “this is a circular story.”

Sometimes the performers seem to step right out of their characters to be modern people who talk of ghosts, or dance with them. “And if you could be a dead guy what kind of dead guy would you be?” Answer: “I’d be a ghost.… Don’t  wanna be a vampire cuz they can’t feel the sun.”

Strangeness that gets under your skin. That’s what haunting is all about. A show to savour.