Last Chance for Fringe

As Simon has duitifully reported, this year's Vancouver International Fringe Festival has officially come to a close. If you didn't manage to make it to any shows, you should feel both theatrically deprived and horribly guilty.

However, you're lucky: rather than wallowing in that guilt, you can head over to the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island and check out the Pick of the Fringe shows - highlights of this year's Fringe selected by a commitee of theatre professionals from Vancouver. Tickets are still cheap (only $15 a pop) and for those of you intimidated by the guesswork involved in navigating the original 70+ shows, they've made it into a sort of "shooting the theatrical fish in a barrel" situation. Basically, you can't lose.

This year's Pick shows are all original solo pieces, touching on wildly different subject matter. Continue reading for brief snapshots of what you'll see...

Uber Alice...the Elaborate Adventures of a New Zealand Manicurist. The only Pick show I've caught so far, Australian transplant Jonno Katz's solo piece is sort of like watching a six-year-old do theatre. A manic, ingenious, creative and very dirty six-year-old. The extremely loose plot has something to do with the search for a new Creation story that somehow involves a manicurist, talking hand-puppets, Oreo cookies, and an audience-involvement sex scene that was the most fun I had in any Fringe show.

The other Vancouverite, Greg Landucci, brings his solo piece Dishpig that played to sold-out crowds at the Havana during the Fringe. Written by Fringe heavy-hitter TJ Dawe, Dishpig details Landucci's horror stories of manning the dish pits at upscale eateries. I saw his preview piece at the Fringe Opening Gala, and his rapid-fire characterization and delivery were incredible. Everyone I spoke to who saw Dishpig left awed, and Landucci has been tagged as one to watch in Vancouver.

Singing at the Edge of the World and So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz! are great mouthfuls of titles. That's pretty much where the similarities end. In the first, Randy Rutherford tells the story of his life as a lovelorn guitarist in Alaska who discovers he is losing his hearing. Accompaning himself with beautiful acoustic guitar, he spins a lovely folk-tale of love, loss, and where we turn when we lose the connective threads that make our lives our own.

So Kiss Me Already, Herschel Gertz! is sort of the same, except set in a summer camp for pre-teen Jews. And without the guitar. So, really not at all. Amy Salloway is a spitfire personality forced to negotiate the blissfully bizarre battlefield of awkward young love when she is packed off to Camp L'Chaim for the summer - a place to learn all the skills befitting a cultured young Jew, such as how to crochet a yarmulke. Hilariously poignant, this show generated huge buzz and lots of sell-outs.

Tickets for all shows are now available at the Fringe website. Pick of the Fringe runs at the Waterfront Theatre until September 23rd, before moving to the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts the following weekend and finishing up at the Jericho Arts Centre from October 3-6.

Photo courtesy of the very prolific random dude on Flickr