Fringe Reviews: Haunted Womb Tour, Escuriales Remixed, Thunderspank, This Playland Is In Your Head, Flamenco con fusion

Haunted Womb Tour, Tomomi Morimoto, Mai Otsuka, Joshua Lamb ***½
You know you’re in for something different when you walk through the black corridor that brings you to the Haunted Womb. Like a trip back to the uterus, this Japanese guitar and dance spectacle works really hard at creating a strange atmosphere. I feel like I can’t mention any of the multiple random elements that make the show the surprising treat that it is without ruining it for you, so I’ll restrain myself. Though Haunted Womb Tour starts with a bang and ends with a whisper (despite leaving us on an exorcism), you’ll still wish that you were friends with its two performers because you know you’d just have a great story to tell whenever you’d come back from partying with them.

Haunted Womb Tour plays at the Black Theatre Workshop, 3680 Jeanne-Mance, on the following dates:
14 THU 19:00 & 21:00
15 FRI 19:00 & 21:00
16 SAT 19:00 & 21:00
17 SUN 19:00

Escuriales Remixed, Alexandre Martin *
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to pay 7$ to go to a gay bar, be forced to sit down and watch two men move around for 45 minutes while sober, then Escuriales Remixed is for you. Etrange Attracteur’s “artistic performance”, as it is called in the Fringe program, plays more like gay softcore domination/submission roleplay than anything else. With its sleeveless black muscle shirts, its vapid electronic music and animalistic movement, it’s hard not to view this show as homoerotic. Nothing wrong with that, of course, except for the fact that the show could have only been better if its two performers had actually gone at it. What can I say? I’m the hardcore type.

Escuriales Remixed plays at EcoHosting Stage, 4119 St-Laurent, on the following dates:
15 FRI 13:00 (2 for 1)
16 SAT 21:45
17 SUN 14:00

Thunderspank, Uncalled For ****
Disclaimer: My roommate is in this show. Still, I don’t think that makes me more inclined to like it because the asshole never does his dishes.
Uncalled For, the comedy group whose name at this point is almost synonymous with the Fringe circuit, serves up a double serving of their brand of humour this year: they perform both a scripted and an improvised show. Thunderspank, the scripted one, is an absurd, caffeinated, schizophrenic, fun(ny) stream of consciousness. Whether they are giving us the most layered “turn off your cell phones” warning or the most understated performance of a Shakespeare play, Uncalled For never spends one second too long on any joke. A fast-paced evening that even the worst case of A.D.D. can enjoy.

Thunderspank plays at the Mile-End Cultural Centre, 5390 St-Laurent, on the following dates:
15 FRI 23:15
16 SAT 14:15
17 SUN 13:30

This Playland Is In Your Head, Elison Zasko & Ricardo Olivares *½
This dance show did nothing for me. Nothing to my brain, nothing to my heart, nothing to my groin even. It seems that Zasko & Olivares believe that as long as they keep moving, people won’t get bored. Not so. If anything, there is something grating about the fact that pop music plays non-stop throughout the 30-minute show, that there is never any break or any silence. This contact improv (let’s hope this is improv otherwise it’s even more embarrassing) reminded me of a teacher who once said that often works of art fail when they don’t have enough constraints. This Playland Is In Your Head seems to have none whatsoever.

This Playland Is In Your Head plays at the Shauna Roberts Dance Centre, 372 Ste-Catherine W., suite 306, on the following dates:
14 THU 20:00
15 FRI 20:00
16 SAT 17:00

Flamenco con fusion, Ricardo Garcia & Julie Gunn **
At one point during Flamenco con fusion, while Ricardo Garcia was performing a masterful guitar solo, my Fringe date turned to me and said “Virtuosity can be so boring.” In a few words, he had judiciously captured my feelings. So the performers in this show do what they do well. Very well even. But so what? Some people make cheese well, but that doesn’t mean I’d pay 10$ to watch them make it. There is nothing new or even remotely original here. This is not a fusion of Flamenco and hip-hop, but simply Flamenco and hip-hop. Only at the end of the show is there a desire to merge the two but, again, as my date said, “You know there’s something wrong with a show when, in the last 25 seconds, you think to yourself ‘This could be interesting…’”

Flamenco con fusion plays at the Mile-End Cultural Centre, 5390 St-Laurent, on the following dates:
15 FRI 16:15
16 SAT 20:15