Fringe

TO Fringe Review: Brothers and Arms

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | 4 Comments

I mentioned this in my preview article for this show, and I compulsively feel like I have to bring it up, even though it’s probably not strictly necessary: the Fringe play Brothers and Arms is written and directed by a friend of mine. Depending on how you feel about things like bias and objectivity in your bloggers, this may be worth keeping in mind while I rave about his show and tell everyone to go and see it…

Brothers And Arms is split into two parallel storylines: in the first, William (Jason Martorino) returns home from World War II missing an arm to his manipulative girlfriend Rebecca (Sara VanBuskirk) and comic artist brother Jazzy (Brad Emes), and has difficulty wrapping his mind around it when things back home aren’t the way they were supposed to be. In the second, Wayne (Emes), an Iraq war vet with some PTSD issues, drops in on his brother Chance (Martorino), a comic book cover artist, and Chance’s girlfriend Kristen, who used to be Wayne’s fiance.

In the first half, the problems come largely from the girlfriend, who has dated both men and tries to seduce Jazzy before William arrives on the scene, and the lack of respect that both the others have for Jazzy and his “doodles,” as they call them. Tension ramps up pretty quickly after William arrives, then has his idealized world view torn apart. In the second, the problems come from Wayne’s mental illness, which causes him to see conspiracies and sedition in Chance’s anti-war comic book cover work. He thinks his brother may be part of a terrorist plot, and when he tries to remove Kristen from their home, things get ugly.

It’s a good plot, and empathy and recognition of how tough it is to be a soldier returning from war is certainly worth talking about. Martorino steals both scenes with his two characters, while Emes does a good job with Wayne’s mental unbalance, though he looked a bit stiff as Jazzy at times. VanBuskirk plays both her roles well, but I find that both female characters are a little underdeveloped here; Rebecca, from the first half, is flat-out unlikeable, and doesn’t seem to have a lot of redeeming qualities that would draw these two guys to her, while Kristen just seems like a victim in all this. I found the second half worked better for me than the first; the pace seemed quicker and the dialogue felt a little more natural.

That said, it’s a strong play where the tension builds towards a believable climax in both halves. Having a soft spot for comic books (just as I know writer/director Stephen Jackson does) there’s a few references in here that I enjoyed, and if you know a bit about the history of comics as propaganda pieces the contrast between the relentlessly anti-fascist, pro-America and unrealistic comics of the 40’s and the left-leaning, anti-George W. Bush comics that were frequently made last decade is interesting. It’s a play worth seeing, even if you don’t know the playwright. If you do get a chance to know the playwright though, you should. He’s a nice guy.

TO Fringe Review: Die Roten Punkte – KUNST ROCK

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | 3 Comments

This show is my unabashed favourite of the Fringe so far. There’s so many things to like about Die Roten Punkte’s KUNST ROCK! that I’m not entirely sure where to begin. If you’re a music fan and are irritated that your favourite Toronto indie blog (this one, naturally) has been taken over by theatre reviews, you should do two things: the first is to calm down, things will be back to normal soon, and the second is to go see this show.

Die Roten Punkte is a two-piece band from Berlin made up of siblings Astrid and Otto Rot. She plays drums, he plays guitar, and they sing songs about things like bananas.

It’s all a terrific parody, of course, as Astrid and Otto strut around making a complete mockery of all kinds of stuffy, pretentious rock. There’s a pretty clear White Stripes caricature here, but it’s all such good-natured fun it’s fruitless to list everyone Astrid and Otto might remind us of on stage. The two of them flirt with members of the audience, dance, run all around the theatre, speak with artsy German accents, load their sampler with sounds from whatever they can find, and actually happen to be pretty good musicians, too. Their stage banter is terrific, and they speak just loudly enough when they’re away from their microphones so you can hear them bicker on stage. Their “mini-rock opera” is about the death of their parents, and their subsequent escape from an evil aunt and uncle; Astrid sings that they were killed by a train, while Otto is convinced their parents were eaten by a lion. They claim that to write their new album they spent three months in a bunker for “creative development,” and for days listened only to the sounds of things like water dripping into a cup and a brush rubbing against a pineapple.

It’s absurd, it’s silly, it’s loud, and it’s a whole lot of fun. Don’t wait until the weekend to see it; Astrid and Otto only have Thursday and Friday shows left in Toronto during the Fringe. After that, you can catch them at festivals in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton and Vancouver. Check out their website for the full tour schedule.

TO Fringe Review: Poison the Well

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | Leave a comment

First, if you’re doing the Fringe this year, try to see something in the Annex Theatre. Monday was the first time I’d seen anything in this venue before, and it’s just a really gorgeous space.

Should the show you see at the Annex be Poison the Well? That’s a tough one.

Poison the Well is about a fictional terrorist hostage-taking in Russia by Chechen rebels. For dramatic reasons that I’m not entirely sure that I buy, the Russians send a single lawyer from an oil company, which has interests in the region and employees among the hostages, to negotiate the release of an arena full of people with a journalist that the terrorists regularly use as their mouthpiece. As if that weren’t enough, the journalist and oil company lawyer were childhood friends; they were separated by the Chechan war, when the lawyer, James (Andrew Connor, also the playwright and director), went back to live in America and the journalist, Maya (Elison Zasko), stayed behind, not knowing whether or not James was alive or dead. They negotiate for the release of the hostages, they renew acquaintances, and try to reconcile how glad they are to see each other with being adversaries in the negotiation. Demands from both sides get personal, the tension builds, and then it’s over.

Does it work that well? Well…no, to be honest. The plot is certainly interesting in broad strokes, and it’s well-paced and builds nicely to a climax. There’s some little twists in it that you’ll enjoy if you’re a thriller novel junkie or a conspiracy theorist who believes strongly in corporate evil and greed. One of the conditions the oil company asks for is if they can add a dozen people to the hostages so that the terrorists can dispose of them, for instance. I rather like the idea of high-stakes hostage negotiation as theatre; I think there is a solid, dramatic idea in here.

Some of the plot elements don’t really hold up to close scrutiny, however, and rely too much on coincidence, like the big reveal that Maya’s brother is mixed up in all this too, a fact James from the oil company is all too aware of. The fact that the rebels are Chechen feels a bit tacked on; there’s not much in the play about the larger geopolitical context, and the Chechen-Russian tensions feels like it could be anything, like Colombia vs. FARQ or Basque separatists vs. Spain or what have you. This causes some problems when, after the show’s climax, a video projector shows images of what I can only guess is devastation in Chechnya on the far wall. After making the terrorism a bit generic, except for a quick aside about how all the hostage-takers are women because all the men in their region were killed, now there’s a statement about the plight of Chechnya at the very end? And why do the two characters come back to slow dance on the table in the dark while these images are playing after they’d ended the penultimate scene with one of them leaving the stage?

It’s an unsatisfying ending that’s a bit strange. There’s a good script in here somewhere, and the acting is fine, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

TO Fringe Review: Relentless Sketch Comedy

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | 3 Comments

If you have been reading my other reviews or happen to be following my Twitter account, you may recall me whining a lot about how I was scheduled to see six shows on Saturday. This is no one’s fault but my own, of course, as I’ve been writing my own schedule as I endeavour to cover the 2010 Fringe for Panic Manual all by myself.

When I was doing my Saturday schedule I thought to myself “ah, a sketch comedy group, that’ll sooth my fractured nerves at the end of a long day of theatre,” and booked Relentless Sketch Comedy, a show from a duo calling themselves Charles from Seattle.

I have no notes on this show, since as soon as it was over I jumped on the streetcar, went home and crashed, so I’m kind of winging it in this review. From what I can recall, Relentless Sketch Comedy is a mostly ok show. A sketch with a ghost “disguising” himself as Patrick Swayze by wearing a different nondescript sheet over his regular nondescript sheet and turning out to be J.D. Salinger brought barely a chuckle for me (though the EYE Weekly reviewer was totally into it). But a lengthy sketch that started out at Westjet flight attendant comedy school and kept escalating until it ended up in a “jokes race” between Air Canada and Westjet and the Prime Minister bringing in replacements during a flight attendant strike was pretty good. Some bits about alternate realities and marine recruitment were also not bad, while an overabundance of vasectomy jokes and a weird zombie/shock DJ bit fell pretty flat.

The two members of the group, Chuck Armstrong and Charlie Stockman, have good chemistry together, and the writing for a lot of the sketches is less dick jokes and more quantum physics jokes, which is a good thing. But the dick jokes there are aren’t that good, and the hit or miss level of the sketches and some screwed up sound cues makes for a pretty middle of the pack show.

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