Bodice Ripper: a love story

An amazing story from one of my favourite parts of Like Water For Chocolate. Excellent opener.

First year university, first English course, first novel, Italo Calvino If On A Winter's Night A Traveller: altered linear narrative is a joy and liberating and subversive. This show allowed such breadth: audience, guest, tech, concepts to introduce in an improv anarchy, 4 bodice genres on a literary charcuterie, with a vapour of Fabio stuck in the lights. Shazam!

It's one thing to curate the gathering of concepts, but to then spin a quarter of a night into a different sub-genre is a high-wire act. To do it, live in front of people, is without a net.

I am predisposed to like everything by Holly Brinkman One of her three performances in the 2024 Fringe was my favorite in the festival. BODICE RIPPER, a dissection of romance novels, is a great idea. The introduction , a reading from a romance novel, an electric performance by Tanisha Harris and an improvised scene with Holly and Tanisha all pointed to how great this show could be. Unfortunately the three improvised stories by Holly were less successful.

I think that there is a really good premise in this show but that it suffered a little in its execution. Essentially it is an improvisational romance novel split into four story elements. My issue was that they all were so disparate to each other that it never really meshed into a single show for me. I would have loved to see characters chosen at the beginning and carried through the whole story. This would have allowed more character development and recurring jokes/references. I think it would have given me something to ground myself in as we explore the multiverse of scenarios. I also enjoyed most the final segment when the guest star and host were working together on the meet cute. They were able to do more improvising and bounce off each other while taking more suggestions from the audience. I hope this show comes back as I would be very interested in seeing a version 2.0.