The show: Bloor Cinema is playing some of the most well recognized films during FringeTO and pairing them with live theatre – a series called Silver Stage. The action takes place in front of the screen – an interesting enough multi-medial adventure, I decided to see how it panned out. I happened to show up for David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (which plays again Thur July 9th); one of many including Rocky Horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jurassic Park, and Repo! The Genetic Opera.
The stage was simple – only a couple office chairs and a couch that were used for anything they needed throughout (a car, a seedy bath house, etc). Props were deliberately low-budget. The live theatre aspect of this FringeTO event was pretty fun; the actors found ways to stretch the references in the film out to include the audience… A water gun to mimic a sprinkler, a cascade of balloons falling from the balcony… It was cute.
My relationship with Lynch is a little shakey. I don’t do well with his variety of anxiety-inducing cinematography. But this sort of worked out for me because the actors played off of Lynch’s more.. “quirky” moments. By over-emphasising the strangeness, it became satirical and thus less troubling (still pretty dang troubling! I’m really reallllly bad with psychological fuckery in film!). It felt, overall, like an elaborate inside-joke that the actors were inviting us in on.
If you’re a film buff, you’ll probably love this. I’ll try to hit up Jurassic Park before FringeTO ends, because I have a theory that the ideal audience for Silver Stage has seen the film.
In a Word: Buttery.
FringeTO Notes: Loving the avid FringeTO fans. You know the ones? Fanny packs, comfy shoes, have seen more shows in the past 4 days than you’d think is humanly possible? I wish I had that kind of get-up-and-go. No, i’m Fringe Lite.
