Reviews

TO Fringe Review: Carnegie Hall Show! & S&P and Sega Geniuses Vs. The World

Posted on July 4, 2010 by Brian in Everything, Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | 1 Comment

photo courtesy the National Theatre of the World website

Let it be known that I think good improv is a really tough thing to do. I admire people who attempt it. It’s great fun when it’s successful, and it’s kind of painful when things aren’t clicking.

It’s tough to review too, since it’s so different from one night to the next. I really like the Carnegie Hall Show. I didn’t like S & P and Sega Geniuses Vs. The World much. Your results might differ entirely.

First, the good: the Carnegie Hall Show, put on by locals The National Theatre of the World, is a good show with a lot of laughs. They’ve been doing this show on a weekly basis for something like a year and a half now, so the chemistry between the performers is top-notch. Noon on a Saturday isn’t the easiest time slot to fill, but after a funny song from “Billable Hours” star Brandon Firla (having local actors sing in their show seems to be one of the show’s schticks this Fringe) and a declaration from Ron Pederson that he was already drunk, they were off.

The first half of the show, the premise being a “retrospective of the greatest ever improvised scenes” on a particular subject, was a bit scattered; the topic taken from the crowd was sunscreen, kind of a tough one to get into, but the cast certainly tried, tossing out scenes of the origins of sunscreen from Roman times when “Romulus and Remus were battling Ramses” for control of Rome and trotting out commercial ideas. The second half, a “radio show” improv with a title of “Theatre of Crickets” sponsored by “Johnson’s boar loin,” also taken from audience suggestions, was funnier. Chris Gibbs stood out as particularly good throughout, though fellow cast members Naomi Snieckus, Matt Baram and Pederson all had inspired moments as well. I highlighted this show as one to see before the festival and was not disappointed.

S & P and the Sega Geniuses are two separate local improv groups. The premise was that each troupe would take half of the hour long show, and they each spoke to an audience member before their set for ideas. The two women who were interviewed talked about what they did for a living, what they liked to do on a date, etc., and theoretically the improv was to flow from that.

However, after an hour of random, scattered scenes I was perplexed. The interviews did provide a lot of material, but neither group really seemed to draw much inspiration from them. The first lady they spoke to was genuinely a bit odd; it somehow came up that she didn’t like to eat with her bare hands, and went to great lengths to explain that while she worked for a design studio, she wasn’t a designer. This led to S & P’s funniest line, when one of the performers stated that he worked in a restaurant, but wasn’t a restauranteur. However, the all-male group seemed to think it was funnier to have two of them pretending to make out on stage, run a few scenes on tired cliches about relationships, and inexplicably have some dull characters in an office scene who mostly just said “all right” and “ok” in moronic voices find a portal to another dimension, which really went nowhere.

Sega Geniuses managed to do a little better with their material, which came from a woman who worked a dull office job to support her real passion of stage managing and didn’t like her roommate’s boyfriend. Still, there weren’t a whole lot of laughs to be had, and the last scene when they decided they were doing a production of Oliver Twist, despite the “director” appearing to not know any scenes from Oliver Twist, dissolved into some mild jokes about the lead being a paraplegic and loudly declaring “I’m EQUITY!” Again, there was probably some good material to explore from the interviewee, but it didn’t really shine through in the improv. I wonder if the two groups were a bit worried about offending the two people they interviewed; it’s one thing to take abstract suggestions from the audience in improv, but it would be hard to take specific things from an audience volunteer and make people laugh at them without being mean.

TO Fringe Review: Under the Mango Tree

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Brian in Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | 2 Comments

Toronto – Under the Mango Tree won Pick of the Fringe last year in Vancouver with a sellout run. This is a little surprising to me after seeing the show last night at the Toronto Fringe. Not to say it’s a poor show or anything, it just didn’t resonate with me the way I’d expect a “Best of Fringe” sort of show would.

It is entirely possible, I suppose, that as a second-generation Canadian, the story just didn’t strike a chord with me. Under the Mango Tree is, after all, an immigrant family’s tale: a single father in a poor village leaves the country seeking a better life, leaving behind his daughter, Timal, with her grandparents, promising to one day return and bring her back with him to Canada to live in prosperity. Set in Fiji, it’s semi-autobiographical, as the playwright and performer, Veenesh Dubois, emigrated from Fiji to Canada as a child, but not before being separated from her family for four years.

The growing disconnection between the character Timal and her father as they correspond by mail is interesting. Her father writes of selling popcorn to tourists on the streets, not wanting to be one of the stereotypical immigrants who drives too cautiously, and living in a flat. Timal, who lives in a small village and knows of little beyond it’s boundaries, doesn’t understand what he’s talking about, and asks whether the villages in Canada have sugar cane fields too. The show is solo-acted by Dubois; along with Timal, who ages from 10 to 16 during the course of the show, Dubois voices a few other characters as well, most often her grandmother, who she brings to life by wrapping a scarf around her head and holding her back as if it’s aching.

It’s a pretty good story, and it has a bittersweet ending after the rather saccharine-sweet beginning, when young Timal’s world was near-perfect. I didn’t feel a particular connection in any of this, though, and to me the narrative just sort of ground along to it’s inevitable conclusion. It’s ably acted by Dubois, who clearly put a great deal of herself into the show, and the characters are fairly well-written. It may just be a little too far outside my personal frame of reference as a white kid from small town Alberta to feel the kind of emotional resonance I would’ve needed to feel to give it a higher rating.

*Note that Under the Mango Tree is not the 90 minutes that your program indicates. It clocks in at a little under 60.

TO Fringe Review: Dance Animal

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Brian in Fringe, Reviews, Theatre | Leave a comment

Dance Animal is a troupe of eight from Montreal, where, from glancing at their press clippings, they appear to be the darlings of the dance theatre scene. It’s not too hard to see why: their show is pretty inventive, the choreography is all right, and there’s numerous references to and in-jokes about different areas of Montreal.

So if I was a dance-loving Montrealer, you’re probably looking at a four or five star review. Alas, I’ve never set foot in Montreal, and I’m less of a dance aficionado than I am a dance cynic. Pie-in-the-sky references to “expressing oneself through dance” and “dance uniting the world” and the like, which are peppered throughout Dance Animal’s Toronto Fringe show, tend to turn me off.

Still, that’s not to say I didn’t enjoy much of Dance Animal’s show. At the risk of appearing slightly less masculine in front of my blog cohorts, it’s a cute show, light-hearted and with a few laughs. The choreography in it seems pretty good to my untrained eye, though the first few numbers look more like a coordinated, high-energy aerobics class. Between dances each member of the group comes out to introduce themselves (there’s Dance Salmon, Dance Chicken, Dance Ladybug, etc.) and tell a little tale of how Dance Tiger – aka group founder, choreographer and director Robin Henderson (in the middle, holding the ball in the photo above) – recruited them for the group.

A lot of the references to Montreal in these monologues are quite possibly lost on a Toronto crowd. And the show has a couple of downright bizarre dance numbers in it, none stranger than the one in which a troupe member comes out in a furry rabbit suit with a whip wearing a corset and panties and proceeds to do a rather sleazy striptease. Yeah. It’s the stuff a furries’ dreams and/or nightmares are made of.

But some of the monologues have some real laughs, and some of the dance numbers are really good, the best probably being the cops & robbers & Spiderman dance done to a jazzy version of the 60’s Spidey cartoon show theme. I feel obligated to say something about the music, writing for an indie blog as I do: the obligatory Gwen Stefani and Beyonce tracks are balanced out somewhat with Boney M’s “Rasputin,” the aforementioned Spiderman swing tune, and, oddly enough, a Coldplay song.

If you like choreographed dance numbers more than I do (and judging by the energy of the crowd, there’s quite a number of people that do) you’ll probably really like this show. If you don’t, and you’re still taken to see this show by, say, a girlfriend or other enthusiastic fan, you’ll probably be just fine.

Classic Album Review: The The – Soul Mining [1983, Some Bizarre]

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Allison in Albums, Classic Albums, Everything, Music, Reviews | Leave a comment

The The has always only really been the brilliant Matt Johnson with an all-star cast, that I maintain to this day is one of the most overlooked U.K. bands of the 80’s. Soul Mining was easily the best album Johnson ever recorded, and contains some of the richest new wave to ever come out of the U.K., period. I use the new wave title loosely here, as this collection of a mere seven songs has more musical range than most boxed sets. One of the things I can most appreciate about this album, even as someone who prefers the concrete to the abstract, is its artistic calibre. I can’t think of too many albums that seamlessly move from accordion-laden sophisto-pop (This is the Day) to epic everything (Uncertain Smile) to plucky dark synth (The Sinking Feeling) to electro-awesomeness (GIANT).

Out of all of the albums I will be featuring in this review series, I think Soul Mining is the most intellectual and least heart-wrenchingly emotional in terms of establishing its pulse/connection with listeners. There’s a slight political bent to some of these songs, but my most favorite tunes are the ones with labyrinth-like arrangements that gently ruminate about this thing called life. Think broad compared to narrow. These songs feel mammoth, epic, and lush with, might I add, the most brilliant use of xylophones ever. There is a bittersweet optimism about the album that can sway either way. As one listener has pointed out, it can sound equally happy or sad depending on your mood. I’m in a great mood today (or maybe that’s just the Robitussin talking), so these songs sound like they’re flying off the Prozac charts.

Let’s get into the cream of this album.

Uncertain Smile is at the very core of Soul Mining, and for me exemplifies everything that a nearly seven minute song should aspire to be.  There’s something about this song that is on my list of “happy places” (Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” is at the top of this list, never failing to appease the cranky monster). No matter how much of a funk I’m in, Uncertain Smile always manages to slip me a musical quaalude by taking me to a rock out with your cock out place of epic proportions. But just like everything else on this album, it’s way more couth than that. As I age, I tend to pay less attention to lyrics, but Uncertain Smile achieves that perfect balance of quasi-philosophical without being the least bit pretentious. Part of its appeal is its ambiguity: “A broken soul stares from a pair of watering eyes, uncertain emotions force an uncertain smile” could easily apply to heartbreak, or any number of other things.

I couldn’t write a review about this album without specifically mentioning the famous piano solo. Jools Holland’s piano solo on this song is in such epic proportions that it is deserving of being a standalone song, and to date is my favourite piano solo of all times. You never want it to end and it almost never does, tapering out with just the right amount of whimper. In fact I’d say that pretty much every song on Soul Mining ends gracefully by fading out into a watercolour bleed.

This is the Day is more bittersweet, and might woefully be more widely identified as “that song in that M&M commercial”. More importantly, it proves that accordions may have a rightful place in pop music after all. Sometimes. I mean, it’s hard not to associate accordions with anything other than lederhosen and Eastern European polka music.

Still, This is the Day manages to ride that dual wave of being nostalgic while being forward thinking; happy and sad at the same time.

The Sinking Feeling and GIANT are other standouts, but I won’t tear them apart because I already sound like a pretentious dick. All you need to know is that Soul Mining is a great album that is highly deserving of a thorough listening to.

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