Colin Thomas

You know how, when you go swimming, your body remembers the water for a long time? After I watched the tap-dance show Neo Soul Ties, my body kept thrumming with rhythmic excitement. Neo Soul Ties is exhilarating!

And, choreographed by Toronto artist Victoria Miller, it’s tapdancing like I’ve never seen it before.

Along with an excellent three-piece band (keyboards, electric bass guitar, and trumpet), four extraordinary dancers lean into tap’s jazz influence. Making space for a whole lot of improvisation, the dancing is often surprisingly lyrical for tap, incorporating sweet, sweet slides and hesitations, as well as insanely fast, sometimes sharply percussive, footwork that uses every surface on the dancers’ shoes to make noise.

The vibe is celebratory, congenially competitive. And you can’t help but get involved, whooping at astonishing feats and feet.

Forty-five minutes fly by.

Then you sink into the afterglow.

In her monologue, Patricia van der Meer reveals that, when she was five or six, she believed she was the second coming of Jesus Christ. Then she got a pair of red Buster Brown shoes and loved them so much she realized she was vain — not holy.

That’s about it.

There’s that bit of quirkiness in God the Daughter but, as van der Meer describes how she lost her Catholic faith, there’s no discovery, no fresh insight. Yes, Catholic relics are creepy. Yes, it sounds like a lot of the saints were mentally ill. Yes, the Catholic church discriminates against women. We know all that.

There’s some charm in van der Meer’s humble performance, but there’s nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

The two sections of Plan V are so distinct they might as well be different scripts. The shorter one works.

In the longer, opening section of her solo show, Eleanor O’Brien takes on the persona of Mama V, a pink-track-suited proselytizer in the revolutionary Pussy Power movement of 2035. Mama V preaches that female sexual empowerment is the ultimate act of resistance to fascism.

I’m all for pussy power and I’m all for Mama V’s lessons, including “Embrace pleasure. Endure nothing.” But O’Brien hollers her way through this material, her polemic leaves little room for sustained narrative, and the video sections, in which Mama V welcomes guests (all played by O’Brien) go on too long and they’re hard to hear.

Then, belatedly, Mama V asks her protégé, Eleanor (played by O’Brien in the flesh, with a costume change), to deliver a testimonial. With nuance, detail, humour, and warmth, Eleanor shares the story of her journey from shame about her genitals to a full celebration of their ecstatic, erotic, spiritual power.

I could have done with more vulnerable, fully explored stories and a lot less of Mama V. Yes, that would be more like The Vagina Monologues, but there would be zero shame in that.

Peak experience. Really. Tymisha Harris’s A Cabaret of Legends had me in tears.

Harris’s voice is so rich and pitch-perfect, it feels surreal sometimes that she’s singing live.

A celebration of Black female singers, A Cabaret of Legends overflows with substance. Harris sings — and contextualizes — Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”. And she frames Bob Dylan’s “The Time’s They are A-Changin’”, which Josephine Baker sang at Carnegie Hall, as a tribute to those killed in gun violence, including the dead from the attack on Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, where Harris lives.

As a performer, Harris is glamorous — satin, rhinestones, extravagant flowers in her hair. And she’s completely embodied, the music flowing through her and making itself elegantly visible in her arms, hands, legs.

Harris honours her subjects rather than imitating them, but that honouring includes musical playfulness, sensuality, and raucous celebration — because there’s Ella Fitzgerald, Beyoncé, and Tina Turner.

Opportunities to witness this kind of excellence are rare. Don’t miss it.

You preach, brother!

The premise of Jean-Daniel Ó Donncada’s solo show is that we’re attending a meeting of the St. Steven’s Youth Group. It’s led by Ó Donncada, a real-life Presbyterian minister, who’s also very smart and very funny.

At one point, Ó Donncada shows a slide of a Venn diagram about the overlaps between three categories that identify him: gay, autistic, and French Canadian. Then he jumps up, taps the sweet spot in the middle of the diagram, and shouts, “Speedos!”

That joke is attached to substantial info: like a lot of autistic folks, Ó Donncada experiences sensory hypersensitivity. For him, baggy swim trunks are torture, but Speedos are just fine, thanks. And that’s one of the fundamental reasons we go to the theatre, right? To imagine ourselves into the lives of other people, to expand our capacity for love.

And that’s the gorgeous thing about An autistic priest and a dog walk into a bar: it’s a bracingly rigorous celebration of human variety.

Ó Donncada, who studied divinity at Yale and Harvard, defies religious sex-shaming: “If it feels good, thank God!”, he says — and “think about the word good very deeply.”

Partly thanks to the broad sweep of the material, there isn’t a slack moment: much to the delight of my gender-nonconforming heart, Ó Donncada manages to weave in his obsessions with Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.

And he allows himself to be vulnerable. The putdown TMI is bullshit, he says. Use it and you’re really saying, “I have a problem with the truth.”

This guy deserves a sell-out run.

Writer/performer Megan Markham’s solo show consists of a series of fairytale-like stories about witches and witchcraft. The imagery and ideas are often charmingly inventive: the library at the centre of the universe that contains every book ever written; the lead character in another story who’s called The Clockmaker because she’s living in time when people love their jobs enough to be named after them; in a third story, the maiden with hair of starlight.

But, by the time I got to that starlight, I was fatigued: I’d been getting a lot of ornamentation, but not much substance.

Markham attempts to pull everything together with a framing device: telling these stories, she’s trying to convince her conservative Christian grandmother that witches are okay. But the okayness of witches is already a given in this piece, so the device holds little tension and supplies little reward.

(You can read all my reviews — including Fringe reviews — on my website, Fresh Sheet Reviews. Click the URL below.)

There are riches in Emil Amok: 69, but you’ve got to negotiate a lot of clutter to get to them.

In his anecdotal stand-up set, writer and performer Emil Amok Guillermo adopts an alienatingly hyperactive persona, his delivery is all over the place, and many of his cappers don’t land.

But he’s not messing around with his content, which is, at times, both funny and moving.

It’s grounding and important to get Amok’s first-person account of what it’s like to be brown in CDTA 34’s America (Convicted Felon Donald Trump’s America, to use Amok’s term): the weirdness of having relatives who support Trump, and the destabilization of Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship after what looked like progress in the arc of racism.

There’s a lovely bit about Amok’s relationship to his trans daughter. When she wants to get feminizing facial surgery, he says, “You’re already Filipino. Isn’t that feminine enough?” (Hey! He said it, not me. And I appreciate his transgressiveness.)

When the bandages come off, he says, touchingly, “Beautiful.”

At the performance I attended, Emil Amok: 69 settled down gradually after its rattletrap beginning.

Remaining performances: Sept 6, 7:30; Sept 10, 5:00; Sept 11, 9:25; Sept 12, 6:15; Sept 14, 4:20. Tickets

(You can read all my reviews — including Fringe reviews — on my website, Fresh Sheet Reviews. Click the URL below.)

To make improv work, you need three things: audience goodwill, creative players, and a format that allows them to shine.

Goodwill was flowing when I saw Duck Duck Moose and every one of the players had a moment or two in which they showed their potential. But the format, which is a riff on Squid Game, defeats them.

For starters, the set-up takes way too long. And part of that set-up, which involves selecting a “random” volunteer from the audience is a cheat: two contenders, who arrived together, had already been preselected in the lobby, which undercut a device that could have created tension and real stakes.

And the body of the piece is not just repetitive (a game, the death of a contestant, a vote about whether to continue), it’s narrowly restrictive. The improv players get a few chances to show their stuff, in monologues before their deaths, for instance. But there are too many players, so opportunities are spread thin. And there’s not a single instance in which two or three players get to develop a scene based on audience suggestions. That’s the heart of improv and it’s missing here.

(You can read all my reviews — including Fringe reviews — on my website, Fresh Sheet Reviews. Click the URL below.)

Lou Laurence, who wrote this piece and is performing it, has charm to burn and an appealingly deep and raspy singing voice. Overall, though, Love, Sharks & Frenching is only intermittently engaging.

The premise is that Laurence is conducting a scientific experiment about how to find surefire success in dating and romance, and she’s doing that by going on group dates with a series of audiences. The set-up works well enough but, around the time when she was pretending to French kiss the whole crowd, she was seriously losing me.

That’s because nothing was adding up to much. A lot of her text is really only a series of introductions to songs that aren’t, themselves, terrifically engaging.

There are oases: a couple of times, Laurence takes suggestions from the audience and improvises songs — about our vulnerabilities, for instance. These bits work because they’re skilled and because, as spectators, we’re finally being invited to play along in a meaningful way — which is always a good thing on a date.

(You can read all my reviews — including Fringe reviews — on my website, Fresh Sheet Reviews. Click the URL below.)

One of the first notes I wrote was, “This actor is not relaxed.” Two short pages later I wrote, “The characterization of the grandma is the best.” That second note marked the beginning of a theatrical seduction.

In The Biscuiteater, writer and solo performer Jim Loucks tells a story that’s loosely based on his grandaddy. In the script, Grandaddy is little Jimmy’s hero, but he also killed a man — brutally — when he was the chief of police in their small , southern-US town. The Biscuiteater is about masculinity, violence, and love.

American actors are sometimes overly enthusiastic to my Canadian eye and that’s how Loucks’s performance struck me in the opening passage, a perception magnified by the tininess of his venue, the Federation Gallery.

But then he became his grandma as a young woman and the evening transformed. Loucks’s choices were so instinctive. The characterization was so thorough, affectionate, and witty. From that point on, I was pretty much a goner.

The Biscuiteater jumps around in time — often abruptly — but, thanks to the actor’s precision, it’s always completely clear what time we’re in and which character is inhabiting his body.

Loucks sings beautifully. Jimmy’s daddy, who cheats on and rages at his mom, is a preacher: “Have You Been Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”

The thematic accumulation is slow, rich — and generous.

This is one of the best shows at the Fringe.

(You can read all my reviews — including Fringe reviews — on my website, Fresh Sheet Reviews. Click the URL below.)