Year: 2005

Perhaps it’s crass, but I’ve been wondering: since I saw 30 plays using the festival’s Fringe Binge passes, would this experience be correctly termed a Fringe Purge?

OK, so it’s not nearly as funny as Andrew Zadel’s Compleat Wrks of the Lndn Frnge Festival (abridged) at last night’s Fringe Fried awards ceremony/massive party. If he can do that in just a few hours with as much back pain as reported, watch out when he’s fully healthy.

I had the privilege to see Andrew Zadel’s play The Body, starring his sister Lydia, for a fourth and final time this afternoon, in the company of talented, beautiful, and (as of about two hours ago) multiple Fringe award-winning Amber. Lydia Zadel has been no less than marvelous in the one-woman show during the week, but today she was absolutely mesmerizing. As she said her final line I felt my eyes stinging, as they have each time, but it wasn’t until a shared glance where Amber and I saw each other’s eyes welling up that we were both finally done in.

(Dammit, I’m tearing up even as I type this six hours later.)

Look, I know I’m a softie. The end of The Natural gets me every time. I get it from my mom. But this was something entirely different, an overwhelming, cathartic reaction to Lydia’s performance and Andrew’s words. So we did the only thing we could: sit there in the front row, two friends trying to comfort and console each other, as the rest of the audience filed out behind us.

Thank you, Lydia and Andrew, for bringing your phenomenal production to the Fringe Festival, and for your friendship during the roller coaster that’s been the last ten days. And thank you, Amber, for sharing the experience and literally being a shoulder to cry on.

Thirty-three ticketed performances later, my 2005 London Fringe Festival experience is over. In roughly chronological order, some memories, notes and impressions:

• Meeting a couple of regular guys, Jorn-Bjorn Fuller-Gee and Iain Ormsby-Knox, at the Peanut Butter Picnic and learning they were staging a performance of The Strange History of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, before they became the stars of the festival.
• Starting the festival by seeing You Kiss By the Book, and subsequently praising it to a woman who then informed me that she was the director.
• Kathy Navackas, Alison Challis, the young woman originally from Winnipeg whose name I never did get Jacqui Vandale, Susan Smith-Goddard, and the rest of the Fringe troupers.
• The Body.
• Lydia Zadel, the gifted and gorgeous star of The Body.
• Andrew Zadel, the masterful playwright of The Body.
• Rosalind and Geneviève; Lil; Leah and Marcey; Jen; Heather, Jonathan, Diana and John; Anne and Peter; Tarah, Jason, Stefania and Caralin; Joshua, Amber and Jeff; Fenulla and Dawn; Colette.
• Talking to Trevor Thompson, a nice guy from Ottawa whose first play is anything but disappointing.
• The Body.
• Being petrified by Tippi Seagram despite being in the very back row at The Arts Project.
• The Body.
• Aerial Angels’ Naughty No-No Show, late and way over time but impressively done; and coming to the realization that the seven pieces of clothing I was wearing weren’t nearly enough.
• Quick-marching home and back between Saturday-evening shows to create and print my own promotional posters for The Body.
• The Body with Amber.
• Andrew’s parody at the Fringe Fried party.

A hearty nice work! to everyone involved in P&J, which was named yesterday as the Impresario show at The Arts Project.

This outdoor production is ambitious and very enjoyable, even though after reading the blurb in the festival program I have a nagging suspicion that I left before it was over. If there is indeed an intermission and a second act, the show certainly doesn’t need them: the first act is self-contained and loops back on itself cleverly to finish up.