Fringe Review: Low Budget Narnia: Now With 50% Less Wardrobe!
Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre 10330 84 Ave
Article content
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe gets a loving evisceration in Low Budget Narnia: Now With 50% Less Wardrobe!
Article content
Starting off roughly where the classic children's book begins, the Psychopomp Theatre production proceeds to rips up entire scenes for the sake of brevity, introduce new magical talking creatures (like smut talking anteaters), and by and large use CS Lewis's book as a starting off point for insanity. About time, says I.
Article content
Article content
Comedy wise it can be a bit hit-and-miss, though the rapt audience at the well-attended opening night performance obviously disagreed. There's plenty of fourth wall breaking, allusions to current events, bad jokes, good jokes, everything up to and including the Pevensie kids themselves thrown in the grinder for a laugh, cheap or not. There's no dead space to be found, so even if the humour doesn't grab you won't be bored.
Article content
Article content
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Edmonton Journal
4 days ago
- Edmonton Journal
Fringe Review: Low Budget Narnia: Now With 50% Less Wardrobe!
Article content Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre 10330 84 Ave Article content The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe gets a loving evisceration in Low Budget Narnia: Now With 50% Less Wardrobe! Article content Starting off roughly where the classic children's book begins, the Psychopomp Theatre production proceeds to rips up entire scenes for the sake of brevity, introduce new magical talking creatures (like smut talking anteaters), and by and large use CS Lewis's book as a starting off point for insanity. About time, says I. Article content Article content Comedy wise it can be a bit hit-and-miss, though the rapt audience at the well-attended opening night performance obviously disagreed. There's plenty of fourth wall breaking, allusions to current events, bad jokes, good jokes, everything up to and including the Pevensie kids themselves thrown in the grinder for a laugh, cheap or not. There's no dead space to be found, so even if the humour doesn't grab you won't be bored. Article content Article content
Edmonton Journal
4 days ago
- Edmonton Journal
Fringe Review: Quiz Icarus a treat for trivia fans
Quiz Icarus Article content Stage 1, ATB Westbury Theatre, 10330 84 Ave. Article content They flew too close to the sun, but oh, it was so worth it. Article content Toronto-based performers Nam Nguyen and Aaron Brown are bonded by their passion for Jeopardy, a love that has shaped their lives in many ways. Brown became a trivia night host, hosting multiple games at various pubs, while Nguyen moved into the world of theatre, keeping his love for the long-running game show to obsessively watching with his girlfriend at the end of the night. Article content They got their dream in 2024, and while the retelling from both angles is actually fascinating, it's what lies underneath that really grabs. Article content Because Quiz Icarus isn't just about getting a shot at becoming a champion trivia master, it's about community. A community of nerds obsessed with knowledge for knowledge's sake, the intricacies of a game that seems fairly straightforward from the outside, even with each other. Article content If you're a fan of trivia, and who isn't, you'll want to prepare yourself because half the fun is answering the questions that pop up throughout the show via the giant Jeopardy screen in the background. Article content
CBC
21-02-2025
- CBC
Stephen King adaptation The Monkey is a sick joke
"Like life," is the warning that arrives with The Monkey 's titular stuffed animal, the words emblazoned on a hat box tween twins Hal and Bill (both played by Canadian Christian Convery at his most Parent Trap) find in their basement. No, not "lifelike" — the grinning, drum-bashing wind-up toy is very specifically "like life." And as Hal winds it up — as the monkey's demon drum sticks come banging down for the first time — we see why. Like a curse, its playing metes out random, gore-happy violence to the hapless citizens surrounding it. Babysitters are decapitated. Mothers' eyes bleed from explosive brain haemorrhages. Immolated aunts trip face-first into cheery lawn signs. Death happens, and as the boys grow into adulthood (both played by Theo James), death follows Hal like a vengeful ghost. But it's not vengeful, not really. In Stephen King's short story, on which The Monkey is based, a charitable read is that King uses the monkey to show that what seems like evil is really misfortune, and its blind strikes are as random and elemental as lightning. Or in other words, as King's character muses: "most evil might be very much like a monkey full of clockwork that you wind up; the clockwork turns, the cymbals begin to beat, the teeth grin, the stupid glass eyes laugh... or appear to laugh...." WATCH | The Monkey trailer: At least, that's what director Osgood Perkins' adaptation The Monkey wants to say. Instead, what it turns out to be is something more like a personification of its demon than an examination of it — perhaps because King and Perkins may just be the two worst possible creatives to bring together. There is King: a masterful and prolific storyteller, with a dogged and occasionally fuzzy handling of his own themes. The kind of writer who will write an accidental self-recrimination of an alcoholic author in The Shining, see and hate the improvement and crystallization in director Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation so much he releases his own TV miniseries remake (sneeringly billed Stephen King's The Shining). In it, he turns that character into a clumsy, blood-drenched hero, alternatively martyring himself for his family and screaming to his son about the benefits of "managerial timber." And there is Perkins: an auteur filmmaker with a singular vision — as well as the technical acuity to pull off incredible visuals on par with The Lighthouse and The Witch director Robert Eggers. Unfortunately, in Perkins's case it's a myopic ability to recreate that moody aesthetic in something like his 2024 film Longlegs, then dash it all whenever the title character — and the only original aspect of his filmmaking — makes its deeply silly, and distractingly off-colour appearances onscreen. Bring the two together, and you get The Monkey. Adapted from a screenplay by horror aficionado James Wan that Perkins originally felt was too dark, the result is a mix of both King's and Perkins's worst qualities. Mix of gore and groaners Perkins seemingly tries to remedy this by adding levity, however it feels like the kind a giggling kid burning ants with a magnifying glass might suggest. And the result is a tonally confused story of both redemption and nihilism, its comedy sapped of almost anything resembling humour. Meanwhile, King's already half-baked original message is only further diluted by Perkins' inconsistent doubling down on it. That said, The Monkey is peppered with original moments: Adam Scott as the panicked father trying to offload, then off the monkey with a flamethrower; a seemingly weed-hazed priest stumbling through a "that sucks, man" eulogy; and a bizarre vape-inspired kill are all chuckle-worthy, if completely superfluous. But as we wade through the hokey bullied-boyhood-nostalgia omnipresent in King works, the conceit starts to wear thin. Especially so as the 1999 awe-shucks, Maine-hell we inhabit here is even more obviously shallow when it's dressed up in JNCOs. Modernizing the plot by having the mopey-eyed kid bullied by a lisping preteen girl instead of a muscle-head jock doesn't do much to improve anything. This is mostly Perkins's invention, but it also leads to a jarring bifurcation of the plot when Hal grows up. The film suddenly switches from coming-of-age tale to be about a sulking father at odds with his own potentially doomed son. It also suddenly veers with a twist that is somehow just as ridiculous as it is unfunny. The split gives Perkins the opportunity to stretch the two points of Hal's life, seemingly to set up more and more occasions for Rube Goldberg death machines, and occasionally amble back toward some semblance of a constantly changing message. Can misfortune ever truly be avoided? Let's watch a man get trampled to death inside a sleeping bag. What is more valuable, loyalty or revenge? Look, a guy skewered by a harpoon. Yada yada, something about social media, true crime and voyeurism. It doesn't have anything to do with the plot, but maybe throw a school bus full of dead cheerleaders in there to — wait, surprise shotgun kill! Cadillac without an engine Based on a supposed lack of character growth in Kubrick's The Shining, King often described the movie as "a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it." Judging by The Monkey not only lacking that growth, but exhibiting a pointed disregard for characterization, it's hard to imagine why he wouldn't say the same here. It's all a grouchy, half-dead approximation of Evil Dead -antics, a kind of dead-eyed carousel of pessimistic dourness that starts out thrilling, and quickly swan dives into boring for the fact that there's nothing under the hood, no real message or even originality in delivering and redelivering the spectacle. The Monkey is not a Cadillac without an engine; it's a rusty clown car running in a closed garage. That's not to say The Monkey is an abject failure. James stretches some impressive acting chops, and Convery does what he can with the woe-is-me middle-schooler trope. But judging by the quality, it's understandable this is a movie Perkins shaped to his liking and King wholeheartedly approved. Both are celebrated horror hands, always ready to crank up the gore to get a reaction. And both are, at times, more inclined to grab at spooky-sounding iconography without concern for how they impact — or even destroy — the story.
