S. Bear Bergman has great faith in the power of theatre to make change, and has been putting his money where his mouth is on that one for some time. A writer, performer, and lecturer, Bear works full time as an artist and cultural worker and loves to see as much live performance as possible – making this a fantastic gig for him.
Children’s theatre is such a tough needle to thread – amuse people of wildly varying tastes and intellectual abilities, sing, dance, don’t scare anyone so much they pee their pants. Every foray into a theatre with a kid is a bit of a crapshoot anyway, since their fears and likes and level of patience is so variable, and the line for Honest Aesop’s Fables was basically full of parents thinking “Please o please, gods of Fringe, let this go well!”
The Very Very Girl, it turns out, is a show about which I had a lot of feelings. It seems designed to evoke feelings, so that feels fair – people around me finished the show in tears, mothers hugged their daughters and a few men held their programs strategically over their crotches. I left a little let down.
A decade ago, the last job had before I quit having proper jobs forever, was as the marketing director for a children’s theatre company. We did nutritional shows, and not fables, but I’ll confess – a great deal of my interest in The Show Must Go On was in understanding to what fates I had been sending those poor jugglers for that miserable period. Jeff Leard, a dynamic and skilled player who must be the envy of all the other children’s theatre companies, has filled me in.
Leard, lithe and energetic, has a variety of tricks up his ruffled purple quilted sleeve and he uses every one of them – his facility with voices and characters, his masculine grace, his well-projected voice, his peculiar ability to make mouth noises – all of them add to this show.
I was really, really excited to see Excuse You at the Fringe this year. I love funny shows, I love memoir/biographical shows, and I love storytelling. As it turned out, Excuse You is a funny, fast-paced 50 minutes of comedic theatre and storytelling. Unfortunately, the show is 90 minutes long.
Let’s cover the show’s good points first, shall we? The cast is sturdy and game, with Erynn Brook (as Deborah) giving the whole business a little extra shine with her talent for character and accents and Chai Lavie, as Tony, holding it down as her classic foil, the Male Chauvinist Pig. And by golly they all tried.
Before the show, standing in line to see Bremen Rock City at the Palmerston Theatre, a number of the kids around me asked “Are we going to see The Wizard of Oz?” Which, I suppose, is the play they had heard of. It struck me on the way out that in ten years, some other Fringe show might be crowded with kids saying “Are we going to see Bremen Rock City?” Yeah, it’s that good.
It’s not perfect, mind you. Not yet. But the bones are so good, I can easily see what it’s going to grow into once it’s got just a little seasoning. The cast is exceptional (more on them in a minute), full of what feels like authentic fun and enthusiasm. It’s not a jazz-hands, imagined performance of what they think children’s theatre should look like, it’s a sincere kind of fun that invites the audience into it. The songs are that magical combination of being kid-friendly while not causing adult ears to bleed.
