These are better than catch and release: Check out some more fringe fest reviews

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This article was published 21/07/2024 (778 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AWOL

RibbitRePublic Theatre

King’s Head Pub (Venue 14), to Sunday

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A pub is the ideal venue for a comedy about a pair of seniors who go on the lam to hit up a heavy metal festival.

Britain’s Rob Gee is Neville and former Winnipegger Jon Paterson (now in Vancouver) plays Cyril in AWOL, an hour-long comedy that returns from last year and has been drawing big crowds. Cyril’s estranged granddaughter’s band, Abscess, is slated to play the Monsters of Death Metal festival and our elderly duo decide they’re going — if they can just break out of their retirement home.

Gee and Paterson have obvious chemistry as their characters bumble towards the fest, getting the biggest laughs from impromptu moments where they’re able to riff off each other onstage. The elderly duo climb scaffolding, crowd surf and dive into the mosh pit (all onstage — not in the actual show’s crowd). It’s a funny show with a killer premise whose storyline could stand to lose the stilted and awkward attempt at occasional rhyming and instead turn the laughs up to 11, to paraphrase Spinal Tap, for maximum laughs.

— Ben Sigurdson

ERIKA THE RED

Monster Theatre

King’s Head Pub (Venue 14), to Sunday

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The Vancouver troupe that brought such fringe hits as Juliet: A Revenge Comedy is back with an epic, high-energy one-woman show.

After a short and hilarious video mockumentary about female Vikings, we meet Erika (played by co-creator Tara Travis), whose village is promptly ransacked by Vikings. Vowing revenge, Erika stumbles upon a quartet of bumbling Norsemen, all voiced and acted by Travis, who convince Erika it wasn’t they who pillaged the town but rather another group of Vikings. They train Erika to fight, and in short order she’s given her titular title, setting off with her new pals on a quest to find the guilty party so she can wreak her vengeance.

The hour-long comedy moves along at a good clip, with Travis seamlessly and hilariously playing a number of different characters (including her horse) in quick succession. (To call it effortless would be to downplay the incredible physicality she employs, which is exhausting just to watch.) Her quick wit and the nearly pitch-perfect writing make for a riotous romp towards Valhalla.

— Ben Sigurdson

SIDE OF RICE

Chromedome Productions

Asper Centre for Theatre & Film (Venue 10), to Sunday

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A son of Winnipeg comes home in this tenderly told memoir of performance and family.

After 49 years of strutting his stuff on stages and sets across Canada, Nicholas Rice fondly and often hilariously rolls back the clock, generously sharing reminiscences from the scrapbook of his life’s experiences with an audience whose focus never strays.

Even as his story leaps past loss and pain, Toronto’s Rice enters laughing and doesn’t stop, immediately forming a relationship grounded in honesty and joy, masterfully telling his tale with a natural lightness.

“The cemetery rocked with laughter,” as Rice shared his mom’s favourite party story — the snowsuit in the blizzard — at her funeral. “Which is a good thing for a cemetery to do.”

Something great happens when a gifted storyteller such as Rice goes back to Square 1.

— Ben Waldman

STAND-UP SCIENCE PRESENTS: VOLCANO

Ben Miller

Asper Centre for Theatre & Film (Venue 10), to Saturday

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Ben Miller’s academic, nerdy and often vivid comic mind erupts in this hour-long set, developed during an artist’s residency at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park.

The New York-based comedian compares radiocarbon dating to online dating, makes the Mohs hardness scale funny and shares some love for his favourite mineral — fluorite. With support from a well-constructed, rapid-fire slideshow, Miller shares unique insights from the thousands of open tabs in his brain.

Miller, who tells jokes with a touch of Demetri Martin, not only understands how lava is made, but is gifted as a science communicator. Like many of the best science teachers, he forms the standard lessons around his own sensibilities, making the audience forget they’re learning.

— Ben Waldman