Victoria’s Got Talent Pt. II - the Fringe!

So we went out to the Fringe Preview show tonight, and for the first time this August I have to say I felt hot (sorry, I have to rub this in a bit for my Florida friends!). We saw 33 previews running between two and five minutes each (rather brain-overloading, really -- next year, Victoria Fringe, split this up into two evenings or something). It would have been 37 previews but mercifully some performers didn’t turn up. The show was quite long enough as it was.

But lest you think I am complaining, I kept a little scorecard of the previews; out of the 33, 17 of them were shows I might be interested in seeing, and eight were shows I will most definitely be seeing (real life permitting). That’s 25 out of 33 shows, pretty darn good average I must say.

As is often the case with these sorts of bare-bones theatrical ventures (and Victoria’s Fringe seems even more low-budget than others I’ve attended -- this is actually a fairly small town, let’s be fair), comedy works best, though we did see some intriguing non-coms, including “Caber-lesque,” which the moment you say it out loud makes you wonder why nobody ever thought of that before, and “The Return of Sex” which I still have no idea what it’s about, but it’s got something to do with sex so naturally I’m interested. :)

Many of the acts were fairly local (Vancouver, other parts of BC, etc), and we were delighted to find that one of the funniest Fringe performers in Canada if not the world, Wes Borg of “The Internet Help Desk” fame, is now a Victoria resident and doing a show here (a hilarious musical tribute to the War of 1812*). I don’t quite know how I’m going to get Wes to sign my copy of YouTube, but I’ll try. Other performers came from New York, Australia and England as well as other parts of Canada. Most were impressive in adverse circumstances.

In short, while swelteringly hot, it was a fun evening that showcased local talent, of which there is a lot, and gives us a sampler of what’s to come. Now we just have to figure out schedules and tickets. :)

*It may interest our US readers to know that Canada (and England, for whom Canada was a dominion at the time) have an entirely different take on that conflict that most Americans do -- but that’s another story for another time.