The 2006 Fringe brings Legoland to Lotusland Vancouver Sun, Page C5, REVIEW: Atomic Vaudeville knows how to push Fringe buttons. This clever company from Victoria takes a strange script by Jacob Richmond, casts it perfectly and presents the resulting carnival of kookiness with such assurance that Legoland is one of this Fringe's must-see events. |
At a hippie colony near Uranium City, Saskatchewan siblings Penny and Ezra Lamb are home-schooled. Legoland is how their pot-smoking elders describe the outside world, and the Lamb kids are dying to get there. Shunted off to boarding school in their grey uniforms, Celine Stubel's Penny and Amitai Marmorstein's Ezra are each seething cauldrons of repression. Penny, in a Louise Brooks bob, and Ezra, in Woody Allen glasses and a cape, engage in hilarious banter mocking all the idiots they have to deal with. Penny's obsession with the singer for a boy band leads them across America to confront Johnny Moon in Orlando. That former pretty-boy's descent into a vile reincarnation as a woman-hating rapper is ably conveyed by presenting Johnny as a wizened, skeletal sack; it's just one of many clever props and technical tweaks that surround the actors and help maintain an aura of wholehearted, hilarious insanity. |