Fringe Character

One of the country’s best-known theatre personalities, TJ Dawe has authored six shows (including Labrador, The Doctor Is Sick and The Curse of the Trickster) and a handful of adaptations of literary works. The script to his original show The Slip-Knot was recently nominated for a Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

In addition to being a prolific writer, Dawe is also a tireless performer — he devotes a good chunk of every year touring his plays. He’s been on stage at everything from the Just For Laughs Festival in Montreal to the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina and is a mainstay of the Canadian Fringe theatre festivals. Dawe is currently on a cross-Canada tour of the Fringe circuit, which takes him to Toronto (July 6-16), Winnipeg (July 20-30), Saskatoon (August 5-14), Victoria (August 25-September 5) and Vancouver (September 8-18). His diary of this year’s Fringe circuit will be updated throughout the summer.

Part 3

Been seeing tons of shows. It’s good to be a performer. You meet people. You want to see each others’ stuff. You figure out which day. You show up and your name’s on the list. You’re in. Then you write them in for your show. It’s a good system.

Saw SARSical — a musical about when SARS shut down the city a couple of years ago. Written by the Rumoli Brothers. They’re a comedy act. SARSical’s their first play. Filled with vaudeville-esque dialogue and gags. Like a Marx Brothers movie — not heavy on plot, but who cares.

Nurse: The hospital staff are all so...

Doctor: Hospitable?

Nurse: And the patients, they’re all so...

Doctor: Patient?

Nurse: You know, sometimes I feel...

Doctor: Like a natural woman?

The music was by Waylen Miki, a guy I worked with in university eleven years ago. He’d adapted the children’s book Mr. Tickle into an opera. I was Mr. Tickle. Orange three-piece suit. Twenty-foot-long arms made of dryer hose. Operated by puppeteers. I’m not making this up. Anyway, he knows what he’s doing and has a taste for the unusual. The SARSical cast were mostly from sketch and improv backgrounds, and Waylen said they’d helped come up with all kinds of stuff for their characters — again, like the Marx Brothers. And given the subject, all the topical references, the cast, everything, it was a big love letter to Toronto. And brilliantly funny.

Stuck around for Late Night @ the Fringe with the Rumoli Brothers, and that was good, too. I’m a fan of theirs. They’re two actual brothers (Kurt and Brandon Firla) and they’ve been doing a free late-night talk show at the Fringe for four years now. They interview people. Actors do excerpts of their shows. There are strange contests whose prizes are old LPs no one’s heard of. They’re Martin & Lewis with ’80s pop-culture references.

That night, among other things, they interviewed a Slurpee. Two of the cast members from SARSical came on and did The Complete Toronto Fringe: Abridged, performing five-second versions of a dozen shows. The Rumolis pulled down a screen and showed close-ups of the Fringe program, doctored. The venue map included “TJ Dawe’s House,” “A Great Place to Score Weed” and “A Great Place to Score with TJ Dawe.” It’s nice to be big enough to be a punch line. I might be doing a bit on Saturday night’s show.

After the Rumolis, there was a set from Calcu-Lator and the Oral Presentation — three guys dressed as high school nerds, one sporting a big calculator like a necklace. Two of them play guitar, one beat boxes and sings. Incredibly well, too. All three dance — excellently. Especially given that the whole thing’s a comedy act. Hilarious stuff. Every city should have avenues to try out strange ideas like that. When they work, they’re astoundingly good.

Haven’t seen a bad show yet. That’s luck, and nothing else. A bad play is truly painful — worse than a bad movie — because you’re a part of it, even just sitting in the audience. You’re in the room, contributing to the hellish silence after the “funny” moments. Applauding half-heartedly when the actors take their bow. If you know the people involved, you’ve got to hang around afterwards and plaster on a fake smile and tell them how great it was. Eccchhhh... Then you wish you hadn’t weaseled a free ticket. It’d be nice to be able to leave anonymously.