By JON KAPLAN
The Fringe is up and running, with splendid sunny weather -- and so far, no terribly humid days -- to help get people out to the various venues.
The festival brings other events in addition to performances, though, and they're worth checking out. One of the most important, especially for presenters and those interested in the behind-the-scenes aspect of theatre, is a series of Tent Talks at the Fringe Club's beer tent (292 Brunswick), all at 5 pm.
The first, on Monday (July 5) is a look how to get a show to the next level of production, after the Fringe. Sponsored by Theatre Ontario, it looks at that organization's resources for artists, past experiences with remounts and grants. The second (Tuesday, July 6), hosted by the Toronto Theatre Alliance, continues the discussion of giving more life to a production, with a discussion about producing, venues and various resources around town. The final discussion (Thursday, July 8), led by the Toronto Arts Coalition, will be a discussion about the arts and the local media, with six panelists tba.
For more info, call the Fringe hotline at 416-966-1062 or www.fringetoronto.com.
Some Fringe participants go above and beyond the call. Dave McKay, who's written and performs in the clown-based show Omie Finds His Way, decided on using a bring-your-own-venue for his production. But then he went and built the venue. It's a geodesic dome located on the Trinity College Playing Field, the same location used by Upstart Crow for Shakespeare's Comic Olympics. The dome stays up for the whole festival, though the two companies using it -- McKay's DeGrassi Knoll and Rock N Roll Puppetshow Productions, presenting Ultimate Rock N Roll Showdown From Space -- have to remove all the equipment each day.
Audiences at the Tarragon Mainspace, one of the Fringe venues, know that the nearby traintracks mean that a rumbling boxcar sound permeates the theatre at least once a performance. But the subway beneath the Palmerston Library Theatre, the site of the KidsVenue, creates a similar problem. I remember in the very first Fringe that splendid clowns Mump and Smoot used the space -- it wasn't then just for kids -- and made great use of the subway vibrations by playing off them. Other savvy artists do the same thing. In one performance of Ouch My Toe, Jonathan Crombie as a comic king took the rumbling to happen because of his royal decree. In another production, The Three B's, the subway gave out its noisy sound in an appropriate atmospheric way just as the three teen detectives were driving through a thunderstorm.
Even a BYOV show gets into this improv act. Staged at the Dupont Woodworking Cooperative just south of the traintracks that continue on toward the Tarragon, Below The Belt has a scene in which two fighting co-workers are trying to one-up each other. At one point, one hurls at the other, "Survivors are the first to go. They leave on the first morning train." And of course the line was uttered just as a train went by.
Coincidence? We think not. Even if it was written into the script, the timing couldn't have been better.
= Critics'' pick (highly recommended)