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Amy's Fringe shows opened last night, so she's past the worst of her summer...we hope. Tech is always stressful, especially for the Fringe Festival. Each show gets maybe 2 hours to do everything...only the highly prepared (such as Amy) survive. (Well...no. The highly prepared survive, and the sloppily prepared get help from the techies and blunder on in life, like sloppy people always do. How do they do that? I envy and detest them for their callous disregard for rules. Sorry...just having a Niles Crane/Felix Unger moment.) This year the stress was compounded. Amy has done two Fringe shows in one summer before, but never while also stage managing a children's show out on the Toronto islands. Three shows at once has meant that she's putting in 14 hour days...she starts at 9am and gets home around 11pm or midnight. No fun at all for poor Amy. I was at both openings last night - both quite fun. One of them is a two-man show, set in a small room with no door. It reminded me strongly of a play I did years ago, which involved two men stranded on a desert island. Both shows involved phoney tai chi, physical and mental contests, games played without chess pieces/cards and the ultimate question "what here is real?" The Fringe playwright had never read Fish or Cut Bait (the show I did back when) so I guess it just proves that some themes are universal. The other is a one-man show, highly autobiographical, by a puppeteer who worked on Fraggle Rock and Labyrinth. It's often very funny, sometimes very sad and ultimately says a lot about the performer...sometimes more from what he doesn't say than what he does. I give him a lot of credit - I'd not want to relive my life, even in biased highlight form, in front of a crowd. I've had an initial interview with the Archdeacon of the Diocese of Toronto...just a basic, "this is who I am" and "this is who we are" meeting. To tell the truth we spent a lot of the time talking about London and the west's increasingly self-destructive attitude toward terrorism...it's like we've learned nothing from 50 plus years of strife in Israel. |
