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Culture Stage

11. Familiar Shows With A Twist

The Fringe never fails to premiere some first-rate scripts (as well as a few that won’t and probably shouldn’t survive after the festival closes).

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But there are always some established scripts and adaptations of well-known works that are worth a look.

A production of Conor McPherson’s The Good Thief, a darkly comic piece about a man who gets into trouble when a kidnapping and murder plot goes wrong (Glen Morris), visits from Australia. A group from London, Ontario, mounts Moises Kaufman’s engrossing The Laramie Project, about the reactions to the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard (Tarragon Mainspace).

A pair of companies from Manchester bring older classics: Aristophanes’ bawdy political comedy Lysistrata and Oscar Wilde’s witty The Importance Of Being Earnest. Don’t look for a traditional take on the material – each show uses an all-female cast (Theatre Passe Muraille Mainspace and Factory Mainspace).

As for newly minted works based on other sources, try The Universal Wolf (a po-mo Little Red Riding Hood at Bread & Circus), Kipling’s Just So Stories (Palmerston Library) and versions of the Greek myths about Icarus (Icarus Redux at St. Vladimir’s) and Jason and Medea (Some Kind Of Hero at Robert Gill).

The most intriguing? Things Base And Weill… Love Can Transpose!, which weds the text of Shakespeare to the tunes of Kurt Weill (Passe Muraille Mainspace).

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