Good Doggy, Bad Kitty

I attended 4 shows at the annual Toronto Fringe Festival, where smaller groups can put on various dramas, comedies, and even musicals. Overall, it was a good outing with some interesting shows.

It did not start auspiciously with Metro, a collection of dance pieces that takes place in a subway: from workers rushing to work, to a budding romance between two strangers. Most of the pieces employed pop music which is not a musically interesting genre, though I have seen some good dance orchestrated to pop. There's a reason dance pieces on So You Think You Can Dance are only about 90 seconds long. The dancer/choreographer Linette Doherty may have extensive dance background but it takes more than that to be good choreographer. Finally, the level of talent is only so-so, with the self-taught hip-hop dancer being particularly underwhelming. He might catch the eyes of some ladies in the club but there are b-boys and pop-and-lockers on youtube that would shame him. The uninspiring choreography and middling talent led to some un-coordinated dancing and a lot of pantomiming. I should have left after 10 minutes even if I was in the front row.

The 2nd show called Plank was a more enjoyable experience. The group Femmes du feu employed their circus/aerial training using typical props such as rope and pole to portray sailors on the high seas. From impromptu contests up on the riggings and mast, to the danger of a storm at sea, their aerial skills accompanied by various sea chanteys convinced us there's a ship on stage. Later on, they became sirens who gyrated around the moon (a suspended hoop) and used the anchor as a trapeze. It was fun while the show played but afterwards, it was clear why this show never really took off since it premiered in 2008. It's too long and insufficiently awe-inspiring to be a "cirque du soleil"-like piece and yet not artistic enough to be a genuine dance show. Nevertheless, an enjoyable 45 minutes.

The 3rd show, Fairy Tale Ending, was the stand-out for me. This wasn't surprising as it went out to be one of the "Best of the Fringe" shows. A fairly large ensemble cast, who included some union-dues-paying professional actors, lived in a land perhaps far, far away. But their life circumstances, which resemble well-known fairy tales, don't end happily. A gruff female cop enlists the help of the only eye-witness, a wide-eyed girl name Jill, to get to the bottom of the alibis of the suspects: Big Bad Wolf, Goldilocks, and Troll. Over-the-top acting and fairly clever songs made it quite enjoyable for me, as well as the numerous children and parents in the audience.

The final show, Spank the Tiger, was also highly rated by the critics and a patron's pick. Unfortunately I have to give a reluctant thumbs down. A sketch comedy troupe composed of asian actors called Asiansploitation ran through quite a few sketches but there were more misses than hits. The first problem is that there was no theme to the overall show, which is acceptable if you are in comedy club, but not in a more theatrical setting. The second problem is the comedians seem unused to the larger stage: either engaging in barely audible mumbling or excessively loud screaming. Some skits were banal: polar bears who destroy their ice floes by driving SUVs and living wastefully; others had promise but petered out: a babysitter caring for a child who keeps saying inappropriate double entendres. Some of the best verge on the absurd: a worker whose lazy office-mates are being replaced by robots, a captured insurgent teaching a new interrogator the correct ways to torture.

This leads us to the main problem, the jokes weren't edgy enough. They were mostly middle-of-the-road sitcom when they needed to walk a fine line between offending and speaking uncomfortable "truths". Consider all those ethnic stand-ups who do "racial" jokes, thanks to their insider minority status. Asiansploitation didn't go there, except for 2 skits. I can understand they may not want to be pigeon-holed but when the alternative is a skit about a whiny authoritarian moderator of a book-club, you might want to play the race card.

And they did it twice. The first was a group of forlorn asian men, when faced with the prospect of an asian woman dating a caucasian man, broke into "I'll Be White For You" (sung to "I'll Make Love To You" of Boyz II Men). The second was a group of Toyota ad execs who try to convince Tiger Woods, since he has some Chinese and Thai heritage, to switch to being asian for his public image because of his recent troubles ("Being black's a bust, take a chance on us"). Both are reasonably amusing but, like most of their skits, lack bite. I can think of a number of of scenarios for inter-racial dating or multi-racial people that has a bit more kick.