Fringe Fest 2024: Day 4
The best day of the festival so far.
Whew. Day four of Edmonton’s 43rd Annual Fringe Festival was a wild one. Definitely the best day yet in terms of overall show quality. You are really missing out if you’re not making it to the French quarter to see what Café Bicyclette and Campus Saint-Jean have to offer. Leave Whyte Ave once in a while. Be adventurous. I know you can do it.
And yet, this is the fourth day of writing reviews at 2:00 a.m., so let’s get going.
Day 4 Reviews
Erika the Red
The greatest Viking was surely a man, right? Wrong! The greatest Viking is Erika the Red, a warrior of justice! Based on a real archaeological discovery, Monster Theatre’s Tara Travis brings the titular Erika to life, as well as every other character in this revengerous adventure. Co-creator Ryan Gladstone was also behind one of my favourite Fringe shows of all time, Juliet: a Revenge Comedy. Tara’s commitment to the bit—to all the bits—really made this production work. Erika the Red is a lot of fun and I would recommend bringing the kids; the Viking violence is gratuitous but PG at worst (or best, depending on how you look at it) and they will love all the silly voices and horse impressions.
Ha Ha Da Vinci
Phina Pipia is an artist and we don't deserve her. That’s not part of a bit or anything, it’s how I genuinely feel. She can sing and dance, rock a tuba and guitar, play keyboard with her feet, stage puppetry, make magic happen, wax Italian, take us to new worlds and travel through time. Pipia’s performance is at once carefully restrained and unapologetically exuberant. Ha Ha Da Vinci is enchanting—Phina Pipia is a star.
Theatre Night of Theatre
Theatre Night of Theatre is so smart. So funny. So meta. Tich Wilson is extraordinary in this expertly written theatre show for theatre people. There are too many punchlines to count, the largest of which is that, after a careful investigation uncovers the true meaning and intention behind each fringe producer and stage manager and actor’s actions, everything is instead exposed as hullabaloo, as a bizarre, unplotted accident. That's what happens when a peerless auteur like Sebastian Atticus Montague-Augustus Sterling-Wilde Thornebrook, audio author, turns their genius to crafting a Fringe production. I even bought their book of stories, which is itself written in character. Theatre Night of Theatre deserved a bigger crowd than our snoozy Monday afternoon offered, and you should help make that happen.
Edmontask
Edmontask is a show inspired by a format I'm not entirely familiar with: Taskmaster, a British comedy panel game show. Five comedians are given several ridiculous tasks to perform, and each attempt is recorded ahead of time to be judged during the show. Some of these tasks worked better than others. The best was the talent show judged by ten year olds, which forced one comedian to significantly alter the bit he planned on doing (the judges’ age was a surprise). Edmontask is fun, but I would rather see a show where the comedy is conjured live.
Truth
“It’s midnight on a Monday; no one is here by accident; you want to be here and I want to be here.” That’s how Martin Dockery began our 11:59 p.m. viewing of Truth, and he was so right. Sardined inside the Grindstone Comedy Theatre, surrounded by Fringe volunteers and several artists with their own shows, I could barely contain my excitement for the first Dockery show of the festival. The man did not disappoint. Dockery maintained a breakneck pace for the full hour with a winding, hilarious, (mostly?) true story of what went down one wild weekend during the pandemic. Dockery knows storytelling is an art, but he makes it work as a science. Each sentence is expertly crafted and meticulously plotted, and everything comes full-circle by the end. I’ve said this in previous reviews, but Dockery is simply the best writer to grace our festival, and I cannot wait to see his other show, Inescapable, later this week.