Fringe Character

TJ Dawe with his Winnipeg billets, the Johnsons.

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 2

I opened, and it was good. Had about eighty or ninety people there, ready to laugh. Bit of a technical snafu towards the end of the show, but such things happen on openings. There was a Free Press critic there. Winnipeg’s one of those cities where a single media source has all the power. In Edmonton, it’s the Journal. In Vancouver, it’s the Georgia Straight. Here, it’s the Free Press. Not that people don’t pay attention to anyone else; but if you get a bad review from the Free Press, good luck. You’ve got an uphill climb ahead of you. In waist-deep mud. Especially because they rate you with stars. Critics hate using stars. Performers hate stars. But readers live by them. No one reads the reviews, they just look at the number of stars a show got. And a good review might have three stars, but that’s not enough. No one leafs through the paper thinking, “You know, I think I’d like to see a three-star show today.”

Woke up this morning and picked up the paper off the porch. Opened to the fringe pullout. There’s my review… four stars. Ahh, good. Five would be better, but I’ll take it. The review says a slightly disparaging thing towards the end, but no matter. People will only remember the stars. The fault in the system can work to your advantage.

The show’s been going well, too. Last night’s crowd was even bigger than opening night, and I was more warmed up. I relaxed and played with it. Had fun. People laughed. The tech cues were spot on. I think this’ll be a good Fringe for me. And I like this show. Not that I don’t like my other plays, but this one’s different. It’s subtle. Also, I’ve only done it forty times or so. There are still many discoveries to be made with a script so little explored.

Met up with ten other performers yesterday to plan for a cabaret we’re going to put on. In Montreal, I used one of my performances to do sketches with other Fringe people. We all see each other’s stuff, we hang out, but we don’t work together. Which is too bad. We should. I got mono my first tour, and had to cancel my Saskatoon run. My stage manager organized a cabaret to raise money and it was a great success. The next year, the Kelowna Fringe folded at the last minute and didn’t refund any of the performers’ application fees. So there were two cabarets to raise money for that. People worked with new partners, tried new things and lampooned what was happening at the festival. It went over huge. So remembering that, I did the sketches in Montreal with five other people. And it was fun.

Shenoah Allen from Pajama Men (Stop Not Going is their show) said we should do it again. And we came up with the idea to do an event in Winnipeg. It’ll be Wednesday at midnight. We met at The King’s Head, a popular pub where there are bring-your-own-voice (BYOV) shows in the evenings. It was my venue for two years. It’s central, and already set up for performances. The owner likes the Fringe. And knows me. He’s into it. So we’ve got our space. Our theme is the macabre and the grotesque. We met to figure out how to promote it, who’s doing what organizational work and who’s doing what piece. We settled on a title: Doctor Caligari’s Cabaret of Curiosities Proudly Presents... A Jolly Unfortunate Canadian Freak-out at Antoine Rolls’ Sister’s Hootenanny. It could be a shambles. It could be brilliant.