In case you haven’t heard, the The Vancouver Fringe Festival kicked off another year on September 5th. There’s a great line of experimental local theatre happening around town. Our contributing writer, Tiva Quinn, went to check our My Name is Sumiko on now at What Lab, 1814 Pandora Street. Here’s what she had to say about this production:
“I came away from My Name is Sumiko feeling that I almost liked it more than I should have. Long story short, this is a promising performer whose best work is yet to come, but see her now anyway, that’s just the sort of thing the Fringe is for.
June Fukumura starts out doing a riff on Marie Kondo, with her clown character, Sumiko, calls her “role model.” Joking about whether or not things spark joy is kind of played out, and each of her bits within the riff gets repeated to the point where it’s not funny anymore. And yet, Fukumura brings so much charm, energy and over the top silliness to her performance as Sumiko that it kind of works. The memory of laughing when she tried to decide if a dildo sparks joy the first time kind of carries you through with good enough humour when she does it the 7th time.
All in all, Fukumura riffs on 3 topics, and the finale, a mashup of Indiana Jones, Titanic, Austin Powers and online dating woes was by far the best.
The promo material that talks about “dicing up stereotypes” might make you think this is going to be a woke, intellectual sort of clowning, but it’s mostly just silly and there’s nothing wrong with that. Turn off your brain, go and enjoy.”
For tickets to this, or any other Fringe show, visit Vancouver Fringe Festival.
By Contributing Writer Tiva Quinn
I didn’t make it when Children of God was in Vancouver last year partly because the idea of making a musical about child abuse and cultural genocide seemed a bit implausible, I wasn’t sure it could really work. In fact, it works brilliantly. The script does a fantastic job of including some humour and even some redemption amidst the pain without shying away from the worst things that happened at residential schools.
The Cultch’s Femme Series is currently featuring Shakespeare’s classic comedy Much Ado About Nothing. You might be thinking, as I was, that it’s unlike The Cultch to put on this type of production; but this is not the classic show you know and love: it’s classic chic. Brought to the stage by Classic Chic Productions, Much Ado About Nothing is a bold and playful romp through the extremes of desire and ambition, loyalty and redemption.
Performed for the first time in Canada, Power Ballad is a shocking and explosive work that explores gendered narratives and the hidden ideologies in the language we use. Created and performed by Julia Croft, this one woman show all the way from New Zealand is loud and disturbing. But that’s the whole point – it’s a live art exhibit of feminist rage that seeks to deconstruct sexist linguistics and find a new articulation of femaleness.
The production of A Vancouver Guldasta touches on a number of themes, but the one that stood out for us was relatable. If you live in Vancouver, there’s a good chance you are an immigrant or children of immigrants. If are not, this production will be an insight to life in the 80s on a number of levels. You almost forget how archaic the video games were by today’s standards, but they were pretty cool back then and fun. Cordless phones were those big brick things, with long antennas you pushed up and down when you made a call. Our family home in the 1980s was a sea of gold, orange and browns, the style of the times. All these things were part of the intimate stage set for A Vancouver Guldasta in the Cultch Lab. This is a smaller venue which is this perfect setting for this production. You feel like you are a fly on the wall in the living room of the Dhaliwal family in the 1980s. This is also to the credit of the amazing cast that never lost our attention throughout.
From Alberta Aboriginal Performing Arts and Punctuate! Theatre comes this dark comedy about the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline. Written and directed by Matthew MacKenzie, Bears strives to increase dialogue about the devastating effects economic greed is taking on the lands of our country’s First Nations peoples. Beautifully performed by a group of talented actors and dancers, the audience was brought to their feet in a standing ovation on opening night.
Not for the light of heart, this stage thriller is brought to 
Map of the Land, Map of the Stars by Gwaandak Theatre achieves the unusual feat of being very educational and raising provocative questions, while at the same time presenting a dreamlike quality as theatre, dance and projected images blend to present a variety of “story beads” about life in the Yukon over the centuries for indigenous people and the various other peoples who came to the country and interacted with them.
Unapologetically provocative, 
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