Theatre For Thought, May 24, Pre-Fringe Edition

WHAT TO SEE AT THE FRINGE, PART I

KEIR CUTLER AND OBSESSED SHAKESPEARE FREAKS

joel fishbane

This column starts a four part series about Fringe shows that I have chosen to endorse based on a subtle combination of instinct, optimism, personal bias or because someone sent me a really expensive bottle of wine.

A Fringe without Keir Cutler is more or less a play without a curtain call: the show will go on, but you’ll always feel like something’s amiss. Like Jem Rolls and Uncalled For, Cutler has become a staple of the Fringe, returning year after year with his latest one-man combination of sharp writing and clever comedy. An obsessive Fringer – he calls the Fringe “one of the nation’s great treasures” – Cutler’s been on the festival circuit since 1999 and the experience has made him something of a veteran. Like the boy scouts, he is always prepared, a lesson he learned the hard way during his early days. Having blanked on his lines during a performance of Teaching Shakespeare, he froze up completely. In a matter of seconds, he had gone from competent actor to a deer in headlights. 

“Nobody realized I had forgotten my lines,” he told me. “They just thought the play was extremely boring.” 

After Dark, January 11, 2011

WildSide, CharPo and Beyond


by Gaëtan L. Charlebois


What a week it has been!

The WildSide Festival was very, very good to CharPo. Our traffic exploded and our contributors, who were everywhere, heard lots of great reaction to this site. The comment most often made was that we offer an immediacy to the theatre dialogue - reviews come out fast and are spread quickly, shared over and over again via Twitter and Facebook. It's also great that the internet allows us to review shows which run two or three nights (as we did with Hamlet, Match Made in Hell, and Mike Birbiglia's My Girlfriend's Boyfriend) and these reviews seem to be appreciated by the readers and artists. (Birbiglia, for instance, tweeted my review of his show to his 50,000 followers and in the ten minutes following his tweet, we experienced a 500 pageview spike on the site - which normally pulls in 150-250 pageviews per day. The dialogue about the show broadened to people from the US, even after the show moved on to Oceania.) So appreciated that our site doubled it's previous record, this week (and that's even if you remove the statistical anomaly caused by the Birbiglian spike).

What WildSide also caused was a lively exchange amongst the CharPo people about how shows should be handled - profiled, reviewed or both - and who CharPo is for. We decided both profiled and reviewed. Identifying who we are meant for is a bit more complex.

Video: Keir Cutler in Rant Demon

Keir Cutler will be bringing Rant Demon to WildSide

Video: Keir Cutler on the Shakespeare Question

Keir Cutler, who offered CharPo a terrific First Person piece, has allowed us to post this video here. It is his take on the question of authorship.

First Person: Keir Cutler on The Solo

Why Solo?

by Keir Cutler

Rant Demon, which will be remounted at the 2011 Wildside Festival at Centaur Theatre in January, is my eighth original solo show.

I have performed my monologues so often, in so many places, it seems that one-man shows is all I ever intended to do.  But in reality, I started out wanting to be a playwright of traditional plays, to be performed by multiple actors.  I even got a diploma in playwriting from the National Theatre School.  For years I sent out my writings throughout the English-speaking world.  Occasionally, I would receive back a nice letter of encouragement, or someone would arrange a reading. Nothing ever got fully staged, but I do have a nice collection of letters from artistic directors asking me to be sure to send them my next play.