All three shows are oddly connected, and not just because I saw them on the same day at Summerhall, the former veterinary college that is the venue with the most character at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Which a new novel set at the Fringe, Charlotte Runcie’s “Bring The House Down,” had told me about, albeit in a snarky way.) Each is about music — the Shaggs, Kurt Cobain, the banjo — but really about something else.
The reviews below are in the order in which I saw the shows – the first clearly an afternoon kind of production, the other two, even more clearly late-night fare.
***Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me but Banjos Saved My Life, Red Lecture Theatre at Summerhall through August 25.
Keith Alessi intersperses a concert of banjo-playing with a folksy if practiced retelling of the story that’s spelled out more or less straightforwardly in the title: The tomatoes that he’d been enjoying since his childhood in Canada caused acid reflux that led to a cancer diagnosis, in which doctors gave him at most a year to live. He underwent conventional medical treatment that worked for him, but he is convinced that his taking up banjo-playing in earnest, leaving behind his career as a business executive, had a real “healing power.” He’s been a cancer survivor now, he tells us, for more than nine years, which is just a couple of years longer than he’s been travelling to festivals and other venues across the English-speaking world with this show, donating 100 percent of ticket sales to charities, which has added up to over one million Canadian dollars; he also tours pediatric hospitals. Even without this information it would be difficult to dislike this show; he even manages to find interesting facts about the history of the banjo. If there is little depth here, that may be part of its appeal. “Tomatoes Tried to Kill Me…” is as simple as the set, which is comprised of four banjos on stands (out of the 52 he tells us he owns), and a plate of tomatoes that are all artificial, as if he can’t even look at real ones anymore. Alessi himself (humbly or preemptively) calls his banjo-playing just intermediate and his jokes corny. But there is at least one sign of a sly wit at play: On the way out, there is a flyer posted on the wall that says “Do You Want To Learn To Play The Banjo?”, with a row of little tear-out tags along the bottom, each of which, instead of a contact number, says simply “No Thanks.”
*** No Apologies, Anatomy Lecture Theatre or Dissection Room at Summerhall through August 24
Emma Frankland’s solo show is undeniably inspired by Kurt Cobain: She begins the hour singing his hit “All Apologies,” and wearing the precise outfit (grey cardigan etc) that the singer-songwriter liked to wear; she goes on to describe how she discovered him when she was 14 and he was 27, and it changed her life. But “No Apologies” is not just for Nirvana fans. It seems really to have two main aims – to advocate for trans people such as herself, and to create what feels like an atavistic exercise in over-the-top performance art. “Kurt Cobain was trans,” she intones repeatedly like a mantra. She strips off her top, baring her breasts, pours hot candle wax on her neck, puts on a dress that looks straight out of Gone With The Wind to relate poetically the myth of Icarus, then later puts on an orange dress that resembles a sunflower, but with an unmanageably long tail, and sings atop the desks at which the audience sits, a holdover from the space’s former use as a classroom. She smashes a guitar apart, and later sets a guitar case aflame. If I didn’t always see the point in what she was doing at any particular moment, there is a sense throughout “No Apologies” not just of a guiding intelligence, but a sincere effort at communicating; not incidentally, hers is one of the few shows at the Fringe that provides captions at every performance, and also (albeit briefly) audio description
“We don’t need celebrities to come out in order to feel validated. We need one another,” Frankland says, sensibly, near the end of a show in which she has spent time wondering “if Kurt Cobain were alive today, would they come out as trans,” and thinking about what the effect would have been “If Kurt Cobain had come out as trans in 1993,” and marshalling evidence that (s)he was indeed trans. It isn’t clear whether Frankland is just being poetic/provocative here, especially when she concludes: “Let’s claim Kurt [as trans]. But let’s aim higher. Let’s claim the sun.”
**Philosophy of the World, Red Lecture Theater Summerhall, through August 24
The show shares its title with an album put out in 1969 by The Shaggs, which was comprised of three sisters who were forced by their abusive father to form a rock band. A Rolling Stone writer initially called it the worst album ever recorded, but it later became a cult favorite by such music luminaries as Frank Zappa and Kurt Cobain. In a prologue in the Fringe show, the three-member troupe who call themselves In Bed With My Brother promise a three-act play about the sisters. And I suppose the hour that followed could be divided into three acts – the first, inventive and engaging; the second, off-putting in the extreme; the third, less off-putting.
In the first, the three performers (Nora Alexander, Dora Lynn, and Kat Cory ), wearing the shaggy wigs that were the sisters’ trademark, more or less pantomime the story that is presented in sentences projected on a screen behind them, each new sentence introduced with a loud bang. It tells how their father, Austin Wiggins Jr., inspired by a palm-reading prediction that his daughters would form a popular band, made them drop out of school to focus on music. “They have to do calisthenics every day,” a sentence is projected on the screen – and the three women do calisthenics. Their father forces them to perform in their small town in New Hampshire; the audience members are encouraged to throw soda cans at them, a form of heckling (which explains why the soda cans handed out to us beforehand were all empty) For the record: They don’t actually play music (it’s blasted over the sound system), but they do have musical instruments thrown at them.
The sisters eventually rebel against their brutal taskmaster, portrayed by Nigel Barrett, and this descends into violence that is increasingly disturbing, a mosh pit-like slugfest that goes on forever.
“This has all been quite a lot,” one of them finally says, looking exhausted after their strenuous pointless workout.
Then Nora Alexander wraps it up with a monologue that lasts about fifteen minutes, first explaining how they came to create the show, and how they identified with the sisters, and the nature of exploitation in art, and the somewhat out of left field story of Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, for which Alexander expresses sympathy. What she says is not unintelligent, but she seems to strive to make it as unintelligible as possible – screaming/speed reading from sheets of paper in her hand (a manifesto?) that she drops one by one to the floor, all the time accompanied by loud abrasive music.
Bed With My Brother are evidently a darling of the Fringe, judging from the awards they received for past shows, and the recommendations for this show in advance from authoritative British critics. It felt a bit like the emperor has no clothes situation, even before they started taking off theirs.
