A Night at the Fringe-For-All ... or How I Spent an Interesting Monday Night Watching Nearly 80 Acts in Three Hours

After the unforgettable experience I had last year covering the St. Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival for the first time, I came to this year’s festival launch and Fringe-For-All program at Café Campus with the same sense of excitement and speculation of what to expect – and not to expect – from this year’s massive line-up.

First of all, festival director Amy Blackmore and interim general manager Al Lafrance welcomed the members of the media who gathered for a friendly 5 a 7 Fringe launch party at the Petit Campus venue, and presented brewer Peter McAuslan with the inaugural Peter McAuslan Award for Fringe philanthropy for his ongoing support towards making the Fringe Festival such a success year after year.

Immediately after the brief welcome and award ceremony, I had the opportunity to chat with Montreal actress Johanna Nutter (pictured at right), who was selected to be this year’s official spokesperson for the Fringe Festival, although she admitted that sometimes she is uncertain of what a spokesperson is supposed to do.

“A spokesperson welcomes people, so I guess I am in charge of being welcoming,” the lively Ms. Nutter told the Grapevine. “I think when you have someone from the outside sing the praises of the festival, it carries more weight. I am perfectly happy to sing the praises of the Fringe Festival.”

Ms. Nutter, who last year won the Cauchon D’Or Award for the best independent theatrical production in Quebec for the French version of her critically-acclaimed solo show “My Pregnant Brother”, will perform the show once again for one night only (June 10) at the Mainline Theatre at 7 p.m. (French) and 9 p.m. (English) as a benefit fundraiser. The proceeds from both performances that night will help her towards staging “My Pregnant Brother” at the world famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival later this summer, where she will perform it at Edinburgh’s legendary Pleasance Theatre.

“Edinburgh is the core of the Fringe, and the chance to perform there is wonderful and very daunting, because of that possibility of performing the play in the best theatre in Edinburgh,” she said.

Ms. Nutter is practically a child of the Montreal Fringe, who has been involved with the festival since its beginnings in 1991, and has nothing but high praise for what the festival has done for her development as an actress and writer. “The Fringe Festival has showed me that I can build my own doors, and that I can write and perform in a show that I have created by myself,” she said. “The festival allowed me to have a sense of control and focus on being creative and create something that people will respond to, and help me towards making a living as an actor.”

At 6:45, we were escorted from the Petit Campus and head upstairs to Café Campus’ main venue, where we were about to experience the “Fringe-For-All”. This is basically the ultimate Fringe sampler, in about 80 local Fringe productions (in both French and English) gave the packed, raucous crowd a taste of what to expect from their respective productions … but at only two-minute snippets per show.

Helmed by the ever entertaining trio of Shane Adamczak, Cat Lemieux and Holly Gautheir-Frankel (aka “Miss Sugarpuss”), the “Fringe-For-All” provided a valuable service to the rookie and veteran Fringe goers of the scope of productions that will be featured during the two-week Fringe A to Z series; some of them were hilarious, some of them were curiously innovative and original, and some bordered on the “it-came-from-left-field” bizarre.

After witnessing all of the nearly 80 Fringe-For-All tidbits, here are some of the shows that caught my attention and will make my potential must-see list: “The Balding” (pictured above), “Racial Roulette”, “Now That I Have Your Attention”, “Beat The Percentages” (a satirical look at Mitt Romney’s political comeback, which is pictured ob the left), “Verbal Diarrhea”, “Made of Meat” (a high-octane dance show that is pictured below), “Annoying Visitor”, “Art-Chaut” and “Alex Cross and His Rise to Fame” (which has three alternate endings).

Finally, one thing that was quite prevalent during the Fringe-For-All was the plethora of promotional flyers, cards and gimmicks that many of the theatrical companies who are part of this year’s Fringe Festival were constantly handing out to us media people to get us to catch their respective shows. And then there were those companies who went the extra gimmicky mile to get our attention, such as “Talk, Mackerel”, which were handing out cupcakes with their promo cards (pictured above); “Cherry on Top!” in which the girl group trio Les Cherries handed out fresh cherries (pictured below ... notice the bowl of cherries at the foot of the singer in the middle); and “La Cravate Bleue”, which had their flyer wrapped around a condom.

Now that I have experienced my Fringe sampler during a lively, jammed packed night at Café Campus, it’s time to really study all the promo material that I was inundated with and make some strategic scheduling of the shows that I would like to catch and make my Fringe experience as interesting as last year. Let the Fringing begin!