Fringing with fiancé

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/07/2015 (3741 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SOLO fringe performer Penny Ashton has a new partner on her tour.

The Kiwi star of Hot Pink Bits is introducing her fiancé, Matthew Harvey, to the Winnipeg theatre crowd. The English-born performer was thinking of coming here merely as Ashton’s support crew, but she convinced him to take the plunge with his one-man poetry cabaret Matthew Harvey Is… Dangerman.

“I told him that the Canadian circuit was a wonderful fairy-tale place of affordable touring, a hugely collegial community, lovely audience members and free accommodation,” she says.

Then the pair is off to Edinburgh, the gargantuan granddaddy of all fringe festivals, in August. Her budget for the run of her Jane Austen show is $30,000. And for that she will take to the streets, waging hand-to-hand combat with other performers for audience members at an event with 3,300 registered shows and countless unregistered ones.

“I personally am so freaking happy to have someone in Edinburgh,” she says. “It’s better with a partner but Canada is manageable alone. Edinburgh is hideous alone. I’ve done it twice but there’s a reason I waited 10 years to do it again.”

Ashton and Harvey met at a poetry reading and it was anything but love at first sight.

“I thought he was stuck up when we met and he thought I was miserable,” she says. “Sounds like a Jane Austen novel.”

They will marry in March.

Winnipeg Free Press | Newsletter

Jill Wilson | Applause

Weekly

A weekly look at what’s happening in Winnipeg’s arts and entertainment scene.

Sign up for Jill Wilson | Applause

Sign Up

I agree to the Terms and Conditions, Cookie and Privacy Policies, and CASL agreement.

— Kevin Prokosh