Fringe Review: 52 Stories is a magical hour with memory

Edmonton Journal

11 hours ago

52 Stories
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Stage 6, Gateway Theatre, 8529 Gateway Blvd.
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To be clear, it's not a magic trick. It's technically a memory exercise, but Dave Morris will still delight with his amazing show, 52 Stories.
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Morris opens a deck of cards and gives them a shuffle, passing it into the audience to mix up. He's going to memorize the order of the deck and recite it back.
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That may not sound impressive until you realize there are more combinations of cards in a deck than there are grains of sand on the earth. It's a huge, and therefore impressive, number, so this isn't some parlour trick.
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Morris uses mnemonic devices to memorize the order, constructing small stories for each three-card combination. He works his way through the deck with visuals such as 'Kim Kardashian painting her teeth,' with each card being a person and an action, then putting them together for the visual.
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What's more impressive is that after memorizing the deck, Morris is able to stop throughout and tell stories about people he uses in his mnemonic device: his grandmother, his mother, and his uncle. After a quick five-minute story break, he continues to march through his memory and the deck of cards.
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He struggles with the last few cards on my night, but that doesn't make the entire experience less wonderful. This is a storyteller with a trick, a memorizer with a story, and a Fringe show full of magic.
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