Montreal Fringe Festival opens crowded Canadian circuit

Let the fringing begin.

The Montreal Fringe Festival opens today, the first of 15 stops over the next three months on the increasingly crowded Canadian circuit.

Montreal traditionally begins the countdown to the 22nd annual Winnipeg Fringe Theatre Festival, set to open July 15.

"It's really the official start of the circuit so that always exciting," says Chuck McEwen, executive producer of the annual Winnipeg summer theatre party.

While there is only one new fringe festival debuting this summer, several other cities are jostling for better position. While Montreal has the spotlight to itself this weekend, next Thursday it will be overlapped by fringes in Ottawa and London, the latter event moving from its traditional late July slot.

A small new festival has popped up in rural Quebec, appropriately called the Piggyback Fringe Festival (June 28-30), before the touring companies pull into Toronto for a Canada Day opening. Regina has jumped up a week to take the spot of the lamentably terminated festival in Thunder Bay and will run concurrently with Toronto.

"Every once in a while there is a re-balancing so festivals can find the right spot in the calendar," says McEwen, "It's hard not to overlap somewhere. Toronto gets 500-550 applications, the most of any festival but they only have 140-150 slots. So it's good to be around that time (to pick up acts that can't get into Toronto).

With 146 companies booked for Winnipeg, the festival still had to turn down 100 applications. Two smaller festivals are now competing for Winnipeg leftovers. This is the second year that Windsor has shadowed Winnipeg and the first time for Hamilton, which has transferred from its previous mid-August placement.

"There is almost a Quebec/Ontario mini-circuit," says McEwen. "If you can't afford to tour all the way to Vancouver, you could do Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, London, Hamilton and Windsor."

Following Winnipeg, acts head for either Saskatoon, starting July 30, or Calgary, kicking off the following day. Then its on to the oldest and still largest fring-athon in North America in Edmonton (Aug. 13-23). The tour wraps up with festivals in Victoria (Aug. 27-Sept.6), Halifax (Sept. 3-13) and Vancouver Sept. 9-20).

Canadian fringe festival attendance is generally growing but gradually. The big ticket-sellers are still Edmonton (77,000), Winnipeg (72,699), Toronto (58,000), Vancouver (26,000) and Montreal (24,567). The smallest is probably Regina with 14 companies and 2,000 admissions.

This is the 19th fringe festival in Montreal, and after wandering around various neigbourhoods has found a home on the legendary Main (Boulevard Saint Laurent). Most conspicuous in the programming is the francophone flavour. To counter the notion that it is an English-only festival, producers have set aside 30 per cent of the slots for French language shows.

A glance through the lineup turned up the usual array of attention-grabbing titles such as How Does a Drug Deal Become a Decent 3rd Date?, 3 Ways to Handle a Telemarketer, S.C.R.E.W.: the Sexual Curriculum Remedial Education Workshop and of course F***ing Stephen Harper: How I Sexually Assaulted the 22nd Prime Minister of Canada and Where it Got Me.

There is already a buzz building around Figure Skating is for Little Girls to be performed on the ice of nearby McGill University's arena and star an accomplished male figure skater. No word yet if he will be paired with the star of another fringe production called Puck Bunny.

"ö "ö "ö

A one-man show about John Weir Foote, the only Canadian chaplain to win the Victoria Cross during the Second World War, will be performed June 20 at PTE's Colin Jackson Theatre.

Marc Moir has written and will perform Padre X, a 90-minute monologue about the Ontario minister who served in Dieppe, saved 32 comrades and voluntarily became a POW for his captured men.

"He's such a Canadian hero but he has been lost to history," says Moir, a Westwood Collegiate graduate. "No one has written an account of his war years."

Admission to Padre X is $12 and showtime is at 7:30 p.m. Moir is planning a run next November around Remembrance Day.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 11, 2009 D3