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Geek Girl Authority
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Girl Authority
Tamar Broadbent Archives
Categories Select Category Games GGA Columns Movies Stuff We Like The Daily Bugle TV & Streaming Events Interviews Music Stuff We Like We had the privilege of chatting with musical comedian Tamar Broadbent about debuting her musical comedy, Plus One, at the Toronto Fringe Festival. Read on for our interview.
Hamilton Spectator
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
Behind the Fringe curtain: Get creative, or die trying
When it comes to writing, there are only three rules: write, write, write. When it comes to writing a play for the Fringe Festival, the rules change exponentially: Write, direct, stage manage, produce, and do the tech if you're not actually on stage performing. Oh, and sell the hell out of your play. Hamilton's Brian Morton knows this. He's been doing it almost since the festival started in Hamilton 20-plus years ago. The first Hamilton Fringe play he ever did was a one-person show in 2006. At the time, Morton was a venue tech, but the Fringe organizers had no budget to pay crew, 'so they gave me a slot and I performed 'Krapp's Last Tape,'' a one-act, single-hander that Samuel Beckett wrote in 1957. Such one-person shows, Morton said, are the bread-and-butter of Fringe because they're easy to produce, 'but they're hard to market. It's so hard to distinguish yourself.' Megan Phillips and the team behind 'Cheese Pervert' takes the show to the mother church of Fringe festivals, to Edinburgh, in August. They're the bread-and-butter because a playwright/director/producer/publicist doesn't have to hire a crew to help. That helps moneywise since 100 per cent of the base ticket price of every show goes to the artists. It also means one person has to carry the load. Lisa Randall, of Toronto, figures she's up to the task. Randall comes to the Fringe this year in an almost roundabout way. She and a collaborator won a spot through the Fringe lottery — which plays get to be staged are selected by a Bingo ball machine. Later, her partner got a spot in the Toronto Fringe and Randall found herself with a Fringe spot and having to go solo. But not to worry: This is her seventh Fringe production, including Toronto and Vancouver. 'It was a good nudge,' Randall said, or a good kick in the pants to finally write 'Sister Sophia Kicks the Habit.' Randall had two aunts who were nuns. The surviving one is 98 and lives in the Mother House in a small Ontario city. 'I stopped practising Catholicism after my parents divorced, the way many people do. At the time of the divorce one of my mother's sisters told her she was going to go to hell.' That was more than enough for Randall to disengage from them and the church. But then she 'started to learn things about their lives — and they became so important to me, not as Catholics but as family members. I gained a deep compassion for them. The play is like a tribute.' Two other solo woman shows are in the works for this year's edition of the Fringe: 'Horseface,' featuring U.K.-born, Toronto-based artist Alex Dallas and directed by Clare Barry, herself a veteran of the Canadian Fringe tour; and 'Catching a Cheese Pervert,' co-written by Kayla Kurin and Krista Rowe (also the director) and starring Megan Phillips. For Dallas, it seems a lot of the hard work for 'Horseface' (the name comes from the Trump insult against Stormy Daniels) has been completed. The show premiered in Orlando in 2019 and has played in Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria. 'Horseface' features U.K.-born, Toronto-based artist Alex Dallas. 'The show came about after #MeToo and the Weinstein trial. I became so enraged about what was being revealed about women's lives that I started to reflect on my own in relation to the way I have been treated by men — teachers, boyfriends, strangers — and I put that rage and comedy into a show.' The show's success and Donald Trump's 34 felony convictions are their own publicity. That 'Horseface' won Best in Show awards in Ottawa and Orlando helps. The Kurin-Phillips-Rowe collaboration also has its origin in the headlines. 'The show is (loosely and unfortunately) inspired by the bizarre real-life case of the 'Swiss Cheese Pervert,' a man who made headlines in Philadelphia in the early 2010s for his … dairy-centric public indecency,' Rowe said. 'We took that strange but true headline and ran it through a feminist glow-up of corporate greed, environmental collapse, and Canada's most ridiculously powerful interest group, the dairy lobby.' In their case, as well as with Dallas and Morton, collaboration seems to be the key to a successful production. Randall even found that as well as working solo was going, collaborating has kicked it up a notch. Randall had worked on 'Sister Sophia' for several years, 'monologue by monologue' (even writing three songs for it) before she showed some of them to another friend, Kate Johnston, an award-winning filmmaker. 'She asked questions I hadn't thought of,' which proved helpful in finding the arc of the story. As for Morton, he's been working with Hamilton musician Chris Cracknell for more than 20 years. 'It's usually his playing Robin to my Batman, but instead, this time, it's me as Robin to his Batman.' Their play has what can be described as a uniquely Fringe title: 'A Non-Canonical Musical Adventure with Pookamhura: Mistress of B-Roll.' It's based on a 12-episode YouTube series Cracknell created about the gaming world. The Fringe play is 'noncanonical,' meaning audience members don't have to be gamers or know the web series to follow the story line, which is about self-discovery, gender identity and the complexities of life. Also uniquely Fringe. The collaboration between Cracknell and his four actors, two of whom are transgender and new to the stage, is a 'creative act of faith, like jumping off a cliff and hoping it will come out OK,' Morton said. The team behind 'Cheese Pervert' takes the show to the mother church of Fringe festivals, to Edinburgh, in August. They, too, have worked together for some time, first connecting while filming a short comedy, 'Break Up Time Machine.' They quickly discovered a shared comedic sensibility rooted in absurdism, a mutual disdain for nepo babies, and a love/hate relationship with therapy, Rowe said. After the show's been written, cast and rehearsed, there's the small matter of publicity. Hamilton Festival Theatre Co., the Fringe's parent organization, has organized online meetings with producers to guide them in getting the word out. 'The Fringe's job is to get 200 people out to the Fringe every day. Your job is to convince those 200 people to catch your show at 4 o'clock,' Morton said. Yet, in the end, it still comes down to the work itself, what the playwright, director and actor leave on the stage. Everyone else is invited along for the ride. How uniquely Fringe.
