Fringe reviews #6: Side quests highly recommended

The Golden Boys, A Magician, Our Father, The Power of Ignorance, Surprise!, Strange Things, Sweat, Tony Wrestles a Stranger, La Vie Parisienne, A Woman's Guide to Romance Novels.

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Cercle Molière (Venue 3), to July 25 👾👾👾 You know when you respond to a text with “lol” but don’t actually crack a smile? This show feels like that. Winnipeg’s Anthony Ferens wrote this gender-bent comedy modelled after The Golden Girls and stars as Devin (Dorothy), alongside Lucas Boudreau (Ross/Rose), Ben Robertson (Sam/Sophia) and JJ Scherr (Blake/Blanche).

Unfortunately, the show lacks the sparkle of the original. It stretches the tight, 22-minute format of the beloved 1980s sitcom into a loose, 75-minute show leading to a bizarre contest to become Manitoba’s next golden boy (literally), padded with too many random stories and unnecessary detours. The cast are cute and charming, and the RuPaul dance break and Sonny and Cher duet are highlights — with the sexy silver daddy patriarch Sam twerking his way into the audience’s hearts (and probably a few fantasies).

But all the talk of golden boys ultimately builds to nothing but blue balls when the naked contest never comes to fruition. — Jeffrey Vallis A MAGICIAN WITH JORDAN ROOKS Rooks Entertainment Productions Son of Warehouse (Venue 5), to July 26 👾👾👾 Magician Jordan Rooks mixes sleight of hand with storytelling in his solo return to fringe, but the magic is sparse and the memoir is underbaked. The Las-Vegas-based performer, who has made more than 100 fringe theatre appearances at various festivals, is attempting to get personal after relying on parody last year as part of a magician duo in the Mary Poppins-themed A Spoonful of Magic.

Sharing a little about his childhood in Indiana and his start in entertainment at 13, Rooks takes some surprisingly dark and heartfelt turns between tricks. The show promises to take the audience on a “magical journey of resilience,” but Rooks’ verbal transitions need work. The anecdotes are unpolished and delivered awkwardly for such a seasoned performer, filling time between too-few tricks.

Opening night’s show was about 15 minutes shorter than the advertised 45-minute runtime. Still, diehard magic lovers will be entertained; expect (voluntary) audience participation. —

Katie May OUR FATHER Stark Raving John Hirsch Mainstage (Venue 1), to July 25 👾👾👾👾👾 Estranged oil-and-water siblings try to find enough common ground to prepare for the funeral of their very difficult father. It’s a classic setup well explored in numerous stories, films and plays. This production, written by Winnipegger Ethan Stark — a Harry S. Rintoul-nominated playwright — subverts that cosy grief framework by not just draping it across the arms of a bible-thumper’s cross, but doing so with profound love and a fierce sense of play.

As siblings Sophie and Oliver meet, repeated dead-naming reveals one character as trans in a conservative Christian family. That narrative tension is ripped apart by voice-of-God audio intrusions that confound first the audience, then the actors and finally the playwright, who charges the stage and demands — speaking to the ether — to know what is happening. By the end, father and adult child have gentle but firm words, one heart is both broken and mended, faith and a green-haired God are lifted gloriously whole from the Bible and, just before the theatre leapt to its collective feet, at least a dozen audience members were audibly sobbing.

Follow this playwright. — Denise Duguay THE POWER OF IGNORANCE Chris Gibbs Planetarium Auditorium (Venue 9), to July 25 👾👾👾👾 When it comes to power, Toronto-based Brit Chris Gibbs is a force to be reckoned with in Fringeland. He typically packs audiences in with his Not Quite Sherlock mysteries, but this year, he revives the 2003 motivational speaker shtick he co-scripted with TJ Dawe, another fringe powerhouse.

Gibbs plays ignorance guru “Vaguen” and does his best to sell his audience on ignorance as a life-enhancing lifestyle choice, backed by well-worn untrue aphorisms such as “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” He even comes up with a new one, suggesting ignorance is a net positive: “The opposite of ‘no’ is ‘don’t-know.’” Vaguen sells idiocy with such smug self-satisfaction, he would doubtless thrive among the talking noggins on Fox News.

But the hour-long comedy avoids being overtly political when being consistently hilarious is enough. And yet, it vividly reflects Isaac Asimov’s famous observation about the American “cult of ignorance” that is “nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Randall King SURPRISE!

Chicka-Hehes Le Studio at Théâtre Cercle Molière (Venue 20), to July 26 👾👾👾 1/2 Two women sing along to Céline Dion’s 1991 R&B banger J’ai besoin d’un chum as they preen and prep for the arrival of the men they love. They’re throwing a surprise party for one of les mecs, Eric.

He’s married to une des filles, but she doesn’t yet know he’s come home with a mistress. Pretty soon Eric’s bumbling parents — a drunk loudmouth mère and mousey incompetent père — show up. Manitoban playwright Marc Prescott exploits the setup for almost everything it’s worth comedically in his irresistible Franglais.

There are no heroes and nothing is learned in this throwback to 1980s and ’90s sex comedies. That’s OK, so long as we’re kept laughing over the hour-long show, presented in French with English subtitles. The mistress who refuses to leave the party is a solid if overextended bit, and the actors commit with infectious frenzy.

— Conrad Sweatman STRANGE THINGS: A STRANGER THINGS PARODY Meraki Theatre Productions CCFM — Antoine Gaborieau Hall (Venue 19), to July 26 👾👾👾 Here’s another fringe show from Meraki Theatre Productions featuring an all-teenage cast.

There’s a moment in this hour-long show where Ghostface yells “wazzup” into the phone. It’s a funny allusion to a scene from Scary Movie, the most famous horror genre parody. That scene in the 2000 movie was, in turn, a satirical