This family production of a the classic children’s tale of Pinocchio is a welcome addition to the fringe and, if you have some little friends and want to introduce them to the fun of the festival , this is a good show to do it. Phil Arnold launches the show with a clever premise and continues to play out the tale with a sense of fun and a veterans hand.

The show uses puppetry and mask as a way for the actor to play all the parts and even brings in a little shadow puppetry for the big scenes with the whale. Arnold has a history of doing children’s theatre and it is obviously a part of the craft he loves. This shows again and again with his sense of play and the way he engages the audience.

This being the opening performance there were a couple of rough spots. The staging made things awkward at times with the audience having to wait for transitions. But to be fair to Arnold the time you have to work out the technical part of a show at any fringe is a couple of hours . Im sure as the show continues it’s run it will improve.

So if you want to take in a show for young families then you can’t go wrong with seeing Phil Arnold perform Pinocchio

So before the show even starts someone in the audience, obviously a good friend of the performers, drops an expletive about a previous review of this show – so i had better tread lightly here. Jimmer Lowe and Stephanie Neale , the creators and performers, of Open Mic Relationship, set us up with two friends who both want to be standup comedians. Oh … they’re best friends.

The two are funny together, have a great rhythm , and with an audience obviously made up of family and friends, get some great laughs. But even without the stacked house they are genuinely funny. Jim has an awkward , uncomfortable in his own skin vibe, that he uses to good effect and Stephanie is a pixie like blond that plays against type and hits some zingers at the audience that they eat up. All well and fine except ……

Here’s the thing. The beginning of the show is awkward at best with no clear way to know when it’s started, despite the actors using this as a bit. Also they completely cop-out on the ending. As a matter of fact there is no ending really. At the end the characters get a chance to play a big club and the majority of the play is the lead up to that moment. But once they do their five minutes at the club we get “thank you everyone for coming out”. There was such a great opportunity here for them to wrap it up with their awkward try at romance ( seen previously) or to give us a “Jim went on to…and Stephanie is now ….” . But we get no ending and not really a beginning.

Don’t get me wrong . They are funny. The references they drop are for the crowd still in, or just out of, school and most of which I got and are funny. The mental health rap was clever and Stephanie’s failed romance bit was great but in the end were left with a standup routine and not a play. And maybe that’s ok. So if you want to have some laughs and not see a play ( though they could make one with some help) then go see Open Mic Relationship

In the Fringe program this piece is described as Spoken Word and that’s right. Words are spoken. But its done with such a richness of language and such thoughtfulness that, like after reading a really important book in your life your left challenged but satisfied.. Jayson McDonald, former local director -actor – writer whom we lost to Vancouver last year, has come back to the London Fringe with lush words that sketch the search for a daughter he never had.

Jayson uses a palate of text and speech that is deep, funny, and meaningful. He effortlessly throws around text like he channeling the spirit of Jack Kerouac, the gonzo journalism of Hunter S Thompson, and the irreverence for the talent of his words that only Jayson has. He also makes clever use of his show last year, the fantastic Magic Unicorn Island, as a part of stitching this story together.

Parts of the play are rough, sadly the tech at this venue has been having some difficulty with a number of shows, and need to be smoothed out as the run continues.Sometime we get a bit lost in the ideas and sometimes we’re not sure where we are but this is the opening night of a new play at the fringe- it’s par for the course. Jason is a talented actor who easily inhabits the roles of the broken father, a ghostly hitchhiker, and a kid who controls a giant invisible robot. Jason feels right at home improvising when things go off the rails a bit but brings us easily back in. This is a new work well worth seeing. If you love words and language then please go see Map of a Foreign Country.

Zach Zultana: Space Gigolo is like every great action movie. An everyman, in this case set in space at a mining colony, finds himself in a series of increasingly not everyday situations, until he is faced with taking on a giant corporations, defeating the evil billionaire, and winning the girl. Even though this is live theatre and not a move this play, done with some serious skill, a great sense of fun, and great acting and writing , becomes a hugely fun romp and a must see for this fringe.

The actor, Jeff Leard, pulls off a one man, full on, blockbuster movie in under an hour and we can’t help but cheer him in as he does. When the play requires that we see a series of epic , yet somehow standard, movie shots jeff jumps out of character and describes them and we, the delighted audience , easily see them.

The pace is frenetic, the writing is clever, and the actor is completely in his element in this full tilt boogie of a play. See this play! and you’ll laugh and cheer as Zach Sultana: Space Gigolo, wins it all.

Sean Quigley
Reviewing for Theatre in London

Annette Roman, playwright and performer of Hitlers Li’l Abomination, brings to the fringe this new play based upon her life and experiences on her fathers survival of the Holocaust and his marriage to her mother, a former Nazi youth. Annette tries to share with us, through snippets of her life life with her family, the story of her relationships with, and understanding of her family.

Annette shows skill in the characterizations and manages a few laughs for the audience but in the end this is a play in search of a clear plot. The ideas are there but they fail to come to the surface and in the end we leave not really understanding what we just saw which is too bad because I left wanting to understand her story better.

But in the end we are left with an unsatisfying tale, told in an unclear way, by someone who obviously has the ability to take the audience along with her , and with a better script and direction, to a more satisfying show. But this is the fringe after all and that is the point. Artists come from all over the planet to our city and try their work out. Sometime it works and sometimes, as in the case of Hitlers Li’l Abomination, it doesn’t.

Sean Quigley
Reviewing for Theatre in London

THE DOWNS

I had no idea what The Downs was about so I sat back as we meet Millie Johnson, hard working farm wife and mother to five daughters, who lives in rural New Brunswick of the 1940s. Millie comes in and begins to fold her laundry and tell us one funny story after another and I thought oh, this is going to be like the hugely popular Wingfield Farms series of plays that are filled with folksy stories and some good old fashioned laughs. That’s not a bad thing. The stories and humour are eaten up by the audience and the theatre is filled with genuine laughs. But then Millie takes our hearts in her hands and leads us in another direction.

See Mille’s in her 40s and her husband, through his irresistible charm and a little dash of Aqua Velva, talks her into having another baby because after five girls he wants  a boy. Well a boy he gets and we in the audience are taken completely in with this truly heartwarming tale of acceptance and generosity of heart.

Sheryl Scott’s work, both as a playwright and actor, is absolutely wonderful. Sheryl writes and acts with a confident and deft hand as she plays all the characters in the play from an old Italian neighbour, to the doctor, to the five daughters, to her husband, and finally her little boy, with skill and charm.  A play like this can be too saccharine, too folksy, and could be written with a heavy hand but this actor and playwright respects her work and the audience too much and we are left at the end warmed and feeling like the world’s not such a cruel place.

We are lucky in London, though we don’t often note it, to have some really outstanding theatre artists and Sheryl Scott is one of our strongest. I hope she’ll keep doing this kind of thoughtful and generous work in our city because our city needs artists like Sheryl. In the end if you want to see a play where you’ll have some great laughs and some heartfelt tears then please, please, please go see The Downs.

Sean Quigley

Reviewing for Theatre in London

Little Misunderstood

If you’re a mother with a teenage daughter or a teenager with a mother then you will find your self nodding in recognition at the play Little Misunderstood. This play, created and performed by mother and daughter Stephanie Fowler and Beatrice Fowler Campbell, is about the turmoil, joy, and misunderstanding between teenagers and parents.

The play was developed after Stephanie, the mom, convinced her then 14 year old daughter, Beatrice, to join with her in creating a piece for an event called Her Story in their home town of Owen Sound. Now as the parent of a teenager I find this in and of itself remarkable but they then set the bar higher by creating a play and taking it on the road beginning with the largest Fringe Festival in North America, The Edmonton Fringe. No small thing.

The writing rings of authenticity and has some real strength with the creators taking the opportunity to play with the ideas of seeing each other as completely alien to each other. In one scene we hear, via a nature documentary voice over, of the environment of the North American Teenager and in another a sports announcer doing a play by play of a fight between siblings. Good fun.

The strength of the play however lies in the dialogue between mother and daughter and then the follow-up monologues where we hear how they feel and why. There is no traumatic event in this play, no confessions of abuse, no suicide attempts, just the straight forward, day to day relationship between a mom and her teenage daughter and it is all the stronger for this.

The production however needs some tightening. The transitions between scenes in Little Misunderstood are awkward and often get in the way of the tempo of piece with the characters leaving the stage and leaving us waiting for the next scene to begin. Also, while the music, remakes of classic 80s tunes underlining the fact that everything old is new again, is very clever it also gets in the way of the tempo of the play. I would strongly advise these players, who I hope will keep creating together, to eliminate everything that gets in the way of the story and lose as many of the scene transitions as possible.

Also the ending, often the toughest part in the writing of a play, doesn’t quite pay off and the audience was left a little confused about whether the play was finished or not.

All in all a good show that I am confident will get better and better as the run at the London Fringe continues and I hope this mother and daughter company will keep working on it. And again, if you have a teenage daughter, or not, go see this show and support this unique team.

Sean Quigley

Reviewing for Theatre in London