Fringe Review: Zack Adams Love Songs for Future Girl

Picking which fringe shows to go to is a bit of an art, if not a full-on lottery. I go based on a gut affinity to the title and blurb, and reviews if I can find any, though I always suspect them of having been written by friends of the acts and it feels unfair to the shows that don’t have any reviews yet. I have the same trouble with the film festival. Although unlike with the movies, I have an embarrassing prejudice I just figured out: I tend towards shows that aren’t local. It’s not because I think locals are less talented than people from other places (in fact I probably have the opposite prejudice there). But I have this idea that if a show is travelling, it means that the performers are more invested in it, that probably they’ve performed it in at least one other place and not totally bombed. For the record, I am not defending this tendency, and I’m only admitting to it because it occurred to me today that maybe others have the same one. Yesterday at a homegrown show there was an audience of seven. This afternoon at a show from Toronto (dance performance Affogato) there were maybe twenty people. And then, after a fifteen-minute trip from Tangente on Cherrier to St. Laurent and Villeneuve, I finally found a pretty much full house, at least sixty people, for Zack Adams: Love Songs for Future Girl. Zack comes from Australia. So, the further away from home a performer, the more intriguing to audiences? Fringe fame aspirants take heed: if you can, do invest in those plane tickets.

This might all sound like a lead-up to saying that his show was no good, wasn’t worthy of the audience, but that’s not my point at all. In fact, the majority of the audience laughed at regular intervals through this thin young man’s self-deprecating monologue with guitar. The story begins with Zack’s perfect relationship with a perfect girl, the sort of girl you’re eager to take home to meet your parents and after that, “you take her around to other peoples’ parents just to show off.” But it wasn’t meant to be: perfect girl dumped him unexpectedly, sending him into a terrible depression and leading him to re-examine every girl he’d ever had a crush on in his life, to see if maybe one of them hadn’t been the real One and he’d just missed it at the time. (Tiny quibble: it’s called Love Songs for Future Girl, but the show is entirely about past girls.) He tells some stories and sings some songs, some of which are connected to these women, some of which aren’t, many of which are really funny. Some things that are very funny in the context of the performance, but might lose their flavour in a review, such as a song to a girl in a previous show audience whose boyfriend didn’t get the point of a comedy show with audience banter: “Your boyfriend got jealous, cause he’s a wingey little bitch” (this cracked me up when I heard it in song).

And through all of this examination of girls of the past, Zack manages to hint to actual good gender politics, which is always a big relief to me (so many otherwise rational men are bizarrely obtuse in this area). And so all in all, Zack Adams is a very enjoyable show, if nothing life-altering. Which then leads me to think that maybe the rest of the audience aren’t going on my far-from-home-equals-good-performer rule and in fact have some more sophisticated ability to know which are the good fringe shows. It plays again tomorrow, Saturday the 18th, at 8:30 pm.