City Tensei

CABARET TERRARIUM
New York-based comedy duo Richard Harrington and Chris Kauffman make a welcome return to the Fringe with their endearing characters, Belgian cabaret star Gustave and his silent sidekick Nhar. This time around, the two find themselves on the run from an assassin and elicit help from the audience to create auditory camouflage in the form of little wooden frogs. Gustave instructs us to stroke the frog whenever we feel the need to laugh, cry, keen, or sigh — and in so doing, the cabaret will transform into a terrarium.
Harrington’s deadpan sincerity as he recounts his adventures from the North Pole to Cali, Colombia is wonderfully funny, with a perfectly orchestrated awkwardness that is delightful to watch. No matter how ridiculous his tale becomes, he doesn’t crack a smile. Once. The show is at once absurd and sweet, smart and silly. In fact, the duo could probably just stand onstage doing absolutely nothing and still be hilarious. And I am not exactly sure why. It just is. —Jessica Potter
*****

CADAVER
Cadaver, written and performed by the female duo Sarah Sharkey and Ellie Heath, may be about a corpse, but it’s a lively piece of theatre. Sharkey plays the character Nicole, an eager yet lonely med student, and Heath plays Nicole’s first cadaver. She truly looks like a corpse, too — at least, until she begins singing and dancing. Performing an autopsy on a dancing corpse would be a challenge to the most experience doctor, let alone a first-timer like Nicole, and a comical animosity develops between the two.
Unlike many plays by young writers, Cadaver takes care to develop its premise beyond a striking initial premise: it soon becomes clear that this corpse is more than just a projection of Nicole’s weakness and insecurities, but also a riddle to be solved herself. The influence of director Steve Pirot can be seen in Sharkey and Heath’s pinpoint timing, and the way the dark mood keeps giving way unexpectedly (yet organically) to moments of comedy. —Curtis Potter
****

CAPTAIN HOOK VS. THE ZOMBIES
See Battle!

CHAOTICA
Human fireball Christel Bartelse brings high energy to this one-woman show about a struggling artist named Alice who’s trapped inside a board game that forces her to make life decisions. With its committed physicality and improvised segments, Chaotica is an exorcism of anxiety in which Alice tries on a series of identities (many of which are worth a chuckle) that may not be right for her but which at the very least help her figure out what she doesn’t want, and empowering her to assert herself accordingly.
The coming-of-age angle may be somewhat tired, but the board game metaphor successfully reifies the effects of chance and will, teaching Alice to adjust to rules and challenges as they arise. Some scenes drag a bit, but her struggles are relatable. After all, don’t all of us occasionally need to tap dance to make ends meet (literally so, in Alice’s case) and I know I could sure use a few more Time-Outs to see how my board is shaping up. —Jessica Earle
***

CHARLOTTE’S WEB
Kate Ryan is an adept puppetmaster and she populates this adaptation of E.B. White’s beloved children’s novel with some very cutesy puppets. Unfortunately, the play feels simply like a parade of puppets — here comes baby Wilbur, the more mature Wilbur, kind and gentle dad (who looks like the country version of Waldorf from The Muppet Show), simple Uncle Homer, wise Charlotte, playful rat Templeton, and the Arnold Schwarzenegger-like show-champ pig.
Ryan remains true to White’s story of how a barnyard spider’s web-weaving saves the beloved Wilbur from the butcher’s block — perhaps true to a fault. Ryan takes few, if any, creative risks. The plot plods along, and the humdrum dialogue gives no sign of the bond between Charlotte and Wilbur that makes their friendship so captivating in the original novel. In fact, Charlotte doesn’t even appear until nearly a third of the way into the play. Charlotte’s Web is a wonderful story, but this might not be the best way to introduce your children to it. —Janet Ngo
**

CHERRY CHERRY LEMON
Yes! This female tour de force is a must-see. From the blissfully unrestrained opening monologues to the touching closing lines, CCL offers an extremely funny yet ultimately poignant look at the sex and/or love lives of two very different women. Megan Hill endears as a highly repressed woman prone to unpredictable bursts of desire, while Keira McDonald delights as a crass character with an unapologetically voracious sexual appetite. Both actors brilliantly execute Keri Healy’s sharp, imagistic script, splicing together exquisite monologues and dialogues, and coming to the realization that their most intimate partners may not be the men they take to bed. And speaking of men, it would be a shame to cast this off as a chicks-only affair. When the characters confess their favourite bedroom pleasures or their most public sexual exploits, both sexes will be eating it up — guaranteed. —Jessica Earle
****1/2

CHOON-HYANG: TRUE LOVE
The legend of Choon-Hyang, the young half-noblewoman who remains unshakably faithful to her beloved even when they are separated by thousands of miles, even in the face of death, is a staple of the Korean stage — there’s a wonderful 2000 film by Im Kwon-Taek called Chunhyang that includes footage from an especially lavish six-hour version of the story. (Weak-bladdered Fringegoers will be relieved to know that this version, performed by Theater Seoul’s Youth Musical Company, is only 60 minutes long.) The youthful cast is cute and full of enthusiasm, and the abundance of exotic costumes give the show a rare level of spectacle for a Fringe show.
However, writer/director Kevin Kim’s adaptation of this timeless story is full of vulgar touches — Elvis impersonations, techno dance breaks, loud slapstick, frequent reminders that Choon-Hyang T-shirts and programs are for sale after the show — that dim this colourful show’s appeal. —Paul Matwychuk
**

CIRCUMFERENCE
Rolling into the Edmonton Fringe all the way from Minneapolis, Minn., Circumference is writer/performer Amy Salloway’s autobiographical account of her high-school struggle with obesity and body image. Salloway does her best to treat this uncomfortably personal subject lightly, laughing at herself and with the audience. But there are also plenty of moments where the audience feels awkward and uneasy at the harsh light Salloway casts upon juvenile obesity.
Salloway dramatizes her adversities in a bittersweet way: the insults of her peers, the physical consequences of obesity, the impediments upon her love life, and the clash between her physical appearance and the person she knows herself to be in her mind. In the Age of Oprah, weight problems are well-trodden subject matter; however, Salloway’s brave, eccentric performance is more than enough to keep you audience engaged. —Curtis Potter
***1/2

CITY TENSEI
A harrowing, metaphysical (or should I say “existential,” since artists seem to love that word?) time-spanning drama, City Tensei takes place on a minimalistic set of white boxes which doesn’t do a lot to capture the audience’s imagination, but perfectly captures the spirit of its protagonists’ tales of love and lost chances. (I was particularly intrigued by the mysterious man in white, who at first seems uncomfortably creepy but turns out to be an all-knowing spirit guide who suffers from his own lack of answers to the countless questions he asks.)
There’s an unabashed romanticism to City Tensei that’s enormously appealing: it’s a play that says the yin to your yang exists somewhere out there and all of life’s trials and tribulations are worth it if they help you discover that pure love. But love isn’t an end in itself, argues playwright Evan Smith: in all of its incarnations, it gives you the capacity to forgive, and the opportunity for clarity  ... and the embrace of pure love is the clearest thing of all. —Curtis Wright
****

COMECOMECRASH
ComeComeCrash begins with the creation of the universe, and ends with the universe flying apart. (Both are represented by four young women with in bare feet and leotards running frantically around the stage.) In between, we get a couple of monologues about spurned girlfriends, a wordless dance piece about a sleeping woman bedeviled by nighttime imps, and a lengthy musical-comedy explanation of the subprime lending crises featuring characters named “Phil T. Rich” and “Don Trodden.”
Essentially, it feels as though the members of the company decided to find a home for every stray piece of writing in their notebooks. But while ComeComeCrash keeps reminding us that everything in the world — a woman giving birth, a student falling asleep in class, gunfire in the Gaza Strip, the stock market collapsing — is connected, the various segments of this show never cohere either tonally or thematically. Even Paul Haggis might find the “crash” metaphor a little overextended. —Paul Matwychuk
**

COWBOY MOUTH
The characters may be named Cavale and Slim, but they’re clearly stand-ins for playwrights Patti Smith and Sam Shepard — or at least what Smith and Shepard might have turned into if they holed up in a shack in the desert and never came out again.
The decision to stage this play — full of wild tonal shifts and abrupt left turns into absurdist comedy — in Blues on Whyte may be the smartest decision director Dave Horak made: he’s filled the room with what looks like several years’ worth of accumulated junk and fetish objects so that walking into the theatre is like entering an alternate reality. At the same time, the real world keeps bleeding through in exciting ways: the glare of the sun whenever Slim or Cavale opens the exit door into the alley, the sound of loud, profane conversation from the bar customers in the next room.
The second smart decision was casting members of Christian Hansen and the Autistics in all the roles — they already have great chemistry, and bring enormous rock ’n’ roll energy to the musical interludes. A true, crazy Fringe experience, and I loved every fucking minute of it. —Paul Matwychuk
*****