I know: sometimes, watching a Fringe show can leave you discombobulated. But hey, it’s part of the game! Think of what audiences in 1953 Paris must have felt when they began to realize Godot might not be coming after all. Or imagine the scandalized hush of spectators confronted with the staged orgy in Dionysus in 69. It may be unkempt. It may even test your patience. But isn’t that part of what theatre is for?
So bear with the audience participation, the sing-songy line readings, and even the monologue on crypto-capitalism. Inside that glorious mess, something might tighten your throat and leave you speechless.
EVIE & ALFIE: A VERY BRITISH LOVE STORY. (Piping hot.) Kettle on. Biscuits ready. Now read out loud: Oh heavens, what an exquisite little piece of thee-ah-tuh. Little, that is, because its gaze rests on the small, ordinary things. Evie (Alex Dallas) and Alfie (Jimmy Hogg) are a British couple muddling along in old age. Their days are spent in the living room: he with the paper, she with her crosswords, and both with a brittle British diction (forgive the well-intentioned alliteration) so clipped that at times they don’t even understand each other. Yet one thing is unmistakable: between them runs a lifetime of habit and affection.
James Gangl’s tender direction divides the stage into two emotional spaces. Upstage, in a warm pool of light, we experience the almost ritual stillness of elderly married life, with just the slow tick-tock of a clock to keep them company. Downstage, a colder white light opens up a series of flashbacks. With no props, the actors move through first encounters, swings and roundabouts, birthdays, disappointments, and the tiny negotiations so typical of a shared life. The show is so firmly grounded in the nonsense of run-of-the-mill normality that it has you in stitches, yet it is so cheekily sweet that it catches you off guard. Not a bad innings at all.
YOU CHOOSE: AN IMPROVISED MURDER MYSTERY. (Quick-witted.) How did an improvised show become the critics’ toast of this year’s Fringe? Certainly, the cast is phenomenal. The energy crackles. At the performance I attended, the audience was almost impossible to contain, their rowdy commentary occasionally drowning out the actors themselves. Yet improvisation is usually the unruly playground of performers, while critics (allow me the narcissistic plural) tend to prize structure and composition above spontaneity. But that is precisely what makes this production so surprising. Making a mockery of the century-old opposition between the director-demiurge and the actor-puppet, co-creators Ruth Goodwin and Liz Johnston have devised an elegant framework that gives the improvisers both freedom and form. As the show begins, each performer draws a character at random from a hat before selecting a handful of props – a coat, a hat, an axe, and so on. We are then whisked away to the Winterhouse Hotel, where a murder has taken place, and every guest is a suspect.
The story changes every night, but the architecture remains. Stationed at the reception desk, Goodwin controls the rhythm with the ring of a hotel bell, moving the cast between duologues, trialogues, ensemble scenes, freeze-frames and audience interaction, while lighting and music continually redefine the atmosphere. Within this precise dramaturgical framework, the performers display astonishing inventiveness and razor-sharp communication. What deserves equal attention, however, is their instinct for balance. They know exactly when to seize a scene and when to surrender it; when to step into the foreground and when to remain silently alive at its edges. That collective discipline gives the evening a clarity that, I must admit, I did not see coming.
BRAVA: A CABARET OF DEVOTIONS. (Virtuoso.) There is an unspoken inheritance among musical-theatre kids. We grow up beneath a constellation of divas: Judy Garland. Liza Minnelli. Bette Midler. We replay their greatest performances, studying every gesture and vocal inflection until imitation becomes some sort of shared education. Yanik Gosselin’s show is an ode to the women who shaped his – allow me, our lives. But make no mistake: there is only one diva onstage, and it is Gosselin himself.
Building his solo concert around songs ranging from “Cabaret” to “As If We Never Said Goodbye” – with a gloriously quirky head-voice rendition of “Hopelessly Devoted to You” along the way – the performer traces his relationship with the great singers who became his emotional release valve. His velvety yet vigorous tenor moves easily between theatrical grandeur and confessional intimacy, while his flamboyant stage presence holds the room. More than an exercise in homage, the concert transforms these songs into acts of self-recognition. The divas’ resilience gives Gosselin a queer vocabulary for moving through the world: one rooted in theatricality, emotional candour, and the refusal to make oneself smaller.
THE ASTROS. (Spartan.) Boys will be boys. And Brianna Russell’s show is, beyond any doubt, about boys. Set entirely in a men’s locker room, among the members of a high-school hockey team, the play is pointedly concerned with masculinity: pressure, bravado, violence and the endless performance of toughness. Yet every team member is played by a woman.
Russell’s beautifully crafted script gives each character vivid dimension while moving with a percussive rhythm, its lines fired across the room like passes in a fast-moving game. As the team approaches its final game of the season – and, for some, the last game of their high-school lives – the locker room becomes a pressure cooker of jokes, taunts and half-spoken fears. Catie Thorne directs with a brisk sense of pace, but much of the ensemble work lacks vitality. The strongest work comes from Emma Cuzzocrea, whose Scott is rowdy and boastful, a booming joke always at hand. By placing male violence in a gender-swapped ensemble, The Astros makes the rituals of the locker room and the pressures of performed masculinity look newly absurd.
CATCHING A CHEESE PERVERT: A PRISCILLA PATTON MYSTERY. (Funky.) If there were a prize for the zingiest Fringe title, this would be a serious contender. Krista Rowe and Kayla Kurin’s comedy taps into the internet’s machinery of snap judgments and conspiratorial thinking. Priscilla Patton (Arleigh Curran) is a dairy-devoted influencer, sworn enemy of vegans and determined to convince lactose-intolerant people that milk is still their friend. When cheese’s good name is compromised by a man who harasses women by displaying it on his penis, Priscilla makes it her mission to expose him.
The audience becomes her follower base, with Priscilla’s phone mounted on a stick at the edge of the stage throughout the show. Beside her, actor José Andrés Bordas cycles through multiple roles with rapid accessory changes and puppet work in a comic mode that recalls Avenue Q. Their performances are vigorous and frequently funny. But the show ultimately feels chaotic for chaos’s sake. The programme notes suggest that misogyny is the underlying tension, but the script could develop that theme beyond wordplay to sharpen its bite. This show has a ticket-selling hook and punchy lines – which, one could argue, is already enough – but, to my palate, this mozzarella could use more stretch.
BELLY BUTTON. (Prismatic.) There are paintings one needs to return to over time in order to properly decipher their composition. That is how I felt about Belly Button, a delicate, audacious work that I suspect is still escaping me. Hemali Sankalya Ratnaweera has written a lyrical text layered with colourful brushstrokes: mother-daughter relationship, sexual discovery, rebellion, intimacy, and so much more. At its centre is Q, a young girl embodied onstage by the adult Shriyanshi Quanoongo, creating a poetic slippage between childhood and hindsight, and space and time. Around her, an all-female ensemble moves like an echo chamber of her feelings: in their hands, the stage becomes a playground of ease and tenderness. But only until Q’s austere mother enters, with Sandy Aurora Ramdin casting a pall over the room.
Set against Q’s discovery of queer love, Ratnaweera’s play is a meditation on how one learns to look at the world. Director Shaharah “Gaz” Gaznabbi conjures stage pictures with a floating plasticity that seems drawn from an Impressionist canvas. The entire show is, in fact, inspired by the work of painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Running away from home, Q finds the artist’s atelier inside her own belly button. I did not know Sher-Gil before seeing this show, and one of Belly Button’s unexpected gifts is that it made me want to look her up. Cosmopolitan and diasporic, suspended between India and Hungary, Sher-Gil approached both sexuality and art with a nonchalant disregard for convention. Belly Button has all of this colour inside it. I only wish its frame held the whole composition more firmly.
POTATO POTATO SAVES THE WORLD (?). (Campy.) If you thought activism and burlesque couldn’t get along, Aristophanes would like a word. In their new show, Potato Potato declare that they want to be “the Greta Thunberg of comedy.” It begins on the brink of a catastrophe: aliens invade Earth to steal its water, giving our anxieties about AI a campy, intergalactic form. In a cosmic courtroom, humanity’s fate will be decided by a comedy contest, leaving five performers to defend the planet. Such a slender plot mainly serves as a launchpad for cabaret sketches and parodied pop songs, all of which attempt to exorcize our fears for the future. The concept has promise, but the energy and jokes never quite reach escape velocity.
