SPLICE devised and performed
by Peter Bramley, Carolyn Cohagan, Lucy
Egger and Ann-Marie Kerr. Presented by
Blue Inc. and the Fringe at the Factory
Studio. July 6-15. $8. Rating:
NNNN Rating: NNNNN
the most inventive show at the Fringe had to be Splice, a century of film moments crammed into an hour of stage time.From the opening image that conjured up the monolith in 2001 — the apelike figure pounded not on a rock but on a film can, extracting a scroll of movie footage — the audience was hooked on a delightful, high-speed trip through the silents, pieces by Hitchcock and Spielberg and takes on The Godfather and the Star Wars series.
Actor/creators Peter Bramley, Carolyn Cohagan, Lucy Egger and Ann-Marie Kerr never stopped spinning out concepts, though occasionally the ideas wouldn’t work if a viewer hadn’t seen the original. Not that it mattered if you didn’t get a 15-second segment, since there was another right around the corner that you would.
Favourites? A Ziegfeld Follies number that morphed into The Wizard Of Oz the shower scene from Psycho done with quick bursts of flashlight-illuminated images clapping hands becoming the aviary predators in The Birds the shark from Jaws riding E.T.’s bike and a jazz improv based on characters in Star Wars that had a series of hand-held spaceships coalescing into an image of Darth Vader.
Magical stuff, this. It deserves a wider audience than it had at its short Fringe run.