Braden Carlisle (dot com)
This is a new one for me: Karen Wilson’s play My Body Is My Home was inspired by her health and wellness book Be Weightless: Like Your Body Love Yourself (2021). The show debuted at the TotE Festival in Salmon Arm, British Columbia in July of 2022. The show is an autobiographical solo show that begins with Karen as a self conscious little girl in dance class and moves through various milestones in her life and the way that those each have connected with her relationship to her body and food: from losing a significant amount of weight, to having an eating disorder, to slowly finding her way into fitness from a healthier vantage point.
Wilson narrates an overview of her life for us from childhood to almost the present day and she has had a fascinating and inspiring journey. I am not sure how much of her own life experience she shared in her book, but she might have a memoir in this material as well. I am also not certain whether every single aspect of this story is true, but regardless, within the play, young Karen drops out of school and moves in with a friend when she is fifteen years old, and then she gets hooked up with a man serving a prison sentence and becomes his girlfriend, and they seem to escape together and go on the lam, and this all happens within the first three minutes of Wilson’s show. I am riveted. I have questions. I want so much more information. Karen’s father plays an important role in the story, and I really wanted to know more about their dynamic from the beginning. It is established that she is continually welcomed home, but I wanted to know what made her so ready to leave at fifteen in the first place? What did she see in this man she was writing to in prison that made her want to give up everything to follow him? What was her father’s reaction to that choice?
I think Wilson might benefit from choosing a few of her stories and fleshing them out with more of these details and instead of narrating them turning them into scenes, perhaps even with a scene partner, where Karen’s experience can really come to full theatrical life. I wanted to see her at the shoe store interacting with a customer and for the growth between this Karen and the sullen girl on the Greyhound bus just a few years earlier to be really clear.
There is also spoken word elements to the performance with lyrics by Megan Abel, which are powerfully written. What I found the most incredible and inspiring about this play was the fact that even though Karen struggles with body image issues, she is fearless when it comes to not just trying new things- but absolutely conquering new things. Not content to just join a class at the gym, Karen decides she can become the teacher. Why not? There is a lot of that same energy, I think, in Wilson writing her book, adapting it for the stage, and performing it for audiences here in Halifax. I stand in awe of that gumption and I celebrate it.
My Body Is My Home plays at the Neptune Theatre Windsor Rehearsal Hall (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 1st: 6:15pm.
Next on my list was Tricked: A Family Magic Show, which has unfortunately already closed. Thankfully, there are still three performances of Actual Secrets: A Weird Magic Show, if you are desperate for some magic in your life this Fringe (and, honestly, who isn’t).
Braden Carlisle (dot com) comes to us all the way from Boulder, Colorado, and he absolutely dazzled a crowd of Haligonian children and their grownups (and me!) this afternoon at Neptune Theatre’s Studio Theatre. I was happy to see this show with an audience full of children because Carlisle is great with kids. I read on his website that he also works as a camp counsellor, which makes absolute sense; he really captures the essence of every child’s favourite camp counsellor. The children in the audience made up a large percentage of the shows’ volunteers (always a relief for a grownup at a magic show), and they were encouraged to scream out whatever popped into their heads throughout the show and Carlisle engaged with them with ease and used these interactions as building blocks both for the show’s comedy, and even for the show’s magic. One trick relies on someone in the audience pointing out how they think the feat was accomplished- and one kid in our audience spontaneously provided this service for all of us.
The show begins with Carlisle doing impossible things with a long piece of rope, he then does an absolutely definitely impossible thing with two playing cards, he does two impossible things with balloons, he basically reads someone’s mind, he does something with a Rubik’s cube that is, logically, impossible, he does something incredible that involves mascots and colouring, and he does impossible things with glasses and bottles. I don’t know how he does it. It brings me so much joy to not know and to believe that he, Braden Carlisle (dot com), is just magical.
I love that magic is a part of Halifax Fringe, and it is bringing in enthusiastic audiences. I (always) wish there were more theatre shows targeted for kids under ten that we could direct all of these parents and their kids to, especially over the Labour Day weekend.
TWISI Fringe Rating: Two Thumbs Jump!
Tricked: A Family Magic Show has closed.
Next I saw a very early version (a staged reading) of Broken Kingdom, a new play by Sid Nesbit. I love the conceit of this play. We are introduced to Venus and Ronnie, who are the same person. Ronnie is Venus’ inner child as captured specifically by the eleven year old Ronnie who wrote a fairytale that got turned into a (home) movie she made with her friends. Venus has grown up to be a writer but they are out of fresh ideas, so they decide to revisit this fairytale and to harness Ronnie’s abundance of creativity and imagination. When Venus begins to change the story, however, Ronnie is offended and wants to end their partnership.
We learn that Ronnie is at a pivotal time in their life and we learn what inspired them to write the story in the first place, but it is not as clear what the stakes are for Venus. Why are they so intent on using this story? If they are so intent on changing things, what is the crux of it that drew them back to this moment in the first place? What has brought them to this moment where they feel like they have to connect with this specific version of themself? I think there’s a lot of room for Nesbit to continue to play with the contrasting voices of the storytellers here- an eleven year old largely making the story up as she goes along versus someone who has gone to university, likely taken a writing course there, has read and been influenced by canonic plays and Classical myths- I think there is so much potential for a really fun and funny clash of styles here. And then, is there a compromise? Does Venus really want just the story that she wrote as a child, or can she have the best of both worlds? Can she use her adult craft AND her child whimsy to create a collaboration?
I also really like the story of the fairytale, which is centred on two sisters coming together to vanquish a common foe.
It feels like this play is quite early in its development process, so I won’t say too much more; I’d rather wait to write a more detailed review in the future when, I hope, it will be staged again.
Broken Kingdom plays at the Neptune Theatre Imperial Rehearsal Hall (1589 Argyle Street) at the following times:
September 1st: 9:15pm.
My evening was capped off with Dial M for MoeFlo: an Improvised Murder Mystery. The conceit of this show is really fun. There are five suspects in a murder case, the details of the murder are gleaned from an early interaction with the audience, and there is one detective on the case attempting to wrap up all the loose ends and determine who is the killer. Before the show begins each of the suspects receives a card and one card reveals that that recipient is the murderer. They keep this knowledge a secret from everyone and attempt to improvise in ways that throw both the detective and the audience off their trail. Juliana Christine was designated beforehand to play the detective, but I’m fairly sure the other five came up with their characters spontaneously in the moment. Our victim was Liam, an avid soccer fan from Brownsville, Ontario (between London and Brantford), and the suspects included his wife, Elizabeth (Becca MacLean), star soccer player Jimmy Jeffries (Kieran Parmerlee), Elizabeth’s grandpa (Alex Naus), Elizabeth’s annoying friend Guinevere (Jessica MacDonald) and sports writer/theatre critic for the Toronto Star Mark O’Reilly (Aaron Richard).
Together the cast did a solid job of bringing out various secrets and storylines that interconnected around Liam and suggested the guilt may fall with one suspect or the other. Alex Naus is especially fantastic as a specifically East Coast grandpa who also grounded the scenes they were in with a clarifying logic rooted in acute listening, not just to their scene partner, but to everything that all the cast members said onstage so they could help to thread the details together. Aaron Richard, as the reporter hot on the trail of a big scoop, also did a great job of helping to cement the storylines and move the action along.
There is room to keep working on establishing and maintaining the high stakes for all the characters in the story arc. For example, what are the stakes for Jimmy Jeffrey when it is revealed that he is involved with Elizabeth and two other women? Guinevere is elated for Elizabeth to find out that she had been having an affair with Liam, but if this is the case why didn’t she tell her beforehand?
The show tonight was this year’s first sold out show of the Fringe and there is just one more show of Dial M for MoeFlo, so I definitely recommend that you get your tickets now if you’d like to go. The special guests for tonight’s performance (September 1st) are Colin McGuire, Jamie White, and Mitchell Horne.
Dial M for MoeFlo: an Improvised Murder Mystery closes September 1st at 5:00pm at Neptune Theatre’s Windsor Rehearsal Hall (1589 Argyle Street).
Halifax Fringe runs until to September 8th, 2024 in a myriad of venues throughout the Downtown and the North End of Halifax. For more information and to purchase all your tickets please visit this website. Masks are mandatory again this year inside all Halifax Fringe spaces. Neptune Theatre, The Bus Stop Theatre, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia Lecture Theatre, and the Cambridge Battery are all wheelchair accessible. Neptune Theatre and the Bus Stop Theatre both have all gender washrooms.
You can follow Halifax Fringe on Facebook. Instagram. TikTok.
A Note On TWISI Fringe Ratings:
I have never liked rating Fringe shows, or any shows, using the 5 Star system as I have done in the past, so last year I started doing something new. From now on I will just be highlighting what I think are 4 or 5 Star Fringe Shows. A Two Thumbs Up Rating equals roughly to 4 Stars, while A Two Thumbs Jump Rating equals 5 Stars. I have stolen (with permission) “Two Thumbs Jump” from my friend Lenny Clayton, who is awesome, who came up with this phrase when she was a young kid reviewing films on YouTube.
