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Saturday July 13th, 2002
By JON KAPLAN
TROPICAL FRUIT
With the Fringe winding down this weekend, you might think you’ve seen everything you could possibly get to. Well, not quite. There’s still the 24-Hour Playwrighting Contest. Remember back last week when over 40 writers hunkered down over their computers and had a to create a play in a day, with some specific items, concepts and places assigned to them? It’s time for the awards to be handed out.
The winner is Matthew Toner, best known for his association with Upstart Crow during the past two Fringes.
If you don’t know his work, catch him as actor – and co-author – in the best of the Shakespeare-inspired productions at this year’s festival, Shakespeare’s World Cup. Mind you, it doesn’t hurt to have the Bard on board as one of your fellow writers.
Toner’s in good company, too, as winner of the Fringe contest. Previous first places went to talented writers Sean Reycraft and Carolyn Hay.
His winning script, The Pimp Hand Of God, deals with two men stranded on a desert island with only a single mango left between them. They’re not allowed to share and yet try to maintain some scrap of civilized behaviour.
Sue Miner directs a staged reading of the script, featuring Mark Brownell and Stephen Reich, Sunday (July 14) at the Tranzac Club. Admission for the 9 pm reading is free.
In addition to the reading – and who knows what artistic directors or their scouts will be lurking in the audience, checking out the script? – Toner gets an $800 prize. Second place and $300 goes to Ian McNulty for Mango Of Love, Mango Of Death, while Joseph Walsh cops third placed and $150 for Islands.
Hmmm… Guess bodies of land totally surrounded by water and an oval, red-and-green, smooth-skinned tropical fruit with sweet orange-yellow flesh were two of the things that had to be worked into the script.
Congrats to all three.
DIVINE DMITRY
It’s great to have your view of an actor turned around 180 degrees. Dmitry Chepovetsky has worked on stages across Canada, appearing in lots of shows, including Picasso in the Canadian premiere of Picasso At The Lapin Agile. Among his TV roles is the young Fox Mulder in The X-Files, and later this month he hits the big screen as a Soviet submarine sonar operator in Harrison Ford’s K-19: The Widowmaker. It’s not just straight scripts that fill his resume – he’s got musical-theatre credits up the wazoo as well.
His key Toronto role until now, though, was in Slip Knot, a problematic show at Factory last season. And while I don’t blame the cast for the problems with the script, Chepovetsky and the others have that association to carry around.
But I gotta tell you, he’s a dream in Denis McGrath and Scott White’s Top Gun! The Musical, one of the audience favourites at this year’s Fringe. As Maverick, a singer/dancer/actor starring as the Tom Cruise character in the song-and-dance version of you-know-what, Chepovetsky is a delightful, entertaining talent, even playing a character several engines short of a functioning bomber. Maverick’s the kind of guy who has trouble with his blocking in a scene – a scene where he’s sitting in the cockpit of a jet – and doesn’t know the difference between Public Enemy and public domain.
He’s surrounded by a great cast, including Steve Gallagher as a gay cohort whose interest in Maverick is below Maverick’s radar, Alison Lawrence as a problem-control stage manager who yearns for the director and Mary Francis Moore as the production’s manipulative, bitchy diva.
Top Gun! is one of the shows chosen as a patrons’ pick, meaning that it has an added performance Sunday at noon at the Factory Mainspace. But don’t wait too long to get tickets, which are available –– if any are still left – in advance box office. Don’t despair if you can’t buy in advance, though. Half the tickets go on sale at the venue 60 minutes before the show, but you’d be wise to be there an hour before that. The lineup will be long.
TOP TRANSFER?
You might, actually, have another chance to see Top Gun! The Musical, if certain audience members at the Thursday show were taken by what they saw. It was producer city at that performance, with Mirvish Productions’ David Mirvish sitting in front of me and Martin Bragg from Canadian Stage sitting in front of him. Independent producer Jeffrey Latimer was also in the house.
So what could happen? Well, remember back several Fringes ago to The Drowsy Chaperone, which gave its first public performances to sold-out, enthusiastic houses. After several rewrites it ended up at the Winter Garden as a Mirvish Production. And Top Gun! is the Fringe’s most successful musical since Drowsy.
Mirvish must’ve had a chuckle or two over some of the lines in the show, like the reference to viewers flocking to Mamma Mia, and the exchange about a musical version of Gorillas In The Mist that played in Toronto. "Mirvish?" asks one of the characters. "No," another answers with a dismissive shrug, "Drabinsky."
Later the director (Drew Carnwath), going through a mini nervous breakdown, refers sneeringly to another fictional Mirvish production in the works – an all-singing version of Independence Day, starring Gregory Hines and Cher.
Spare us those, please, but I think Toronto audiences could handle more Top Gun! The Musical.
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