Art by Dave Pruden

July 27th-

We have entered the last weekend of Fringe. We ended up reviewing 144 of the shows this Fringe, thanks to a number of ones sent in to us and the hard work of our volunteer Jenny Staff reviewers.

The Fabulous Jenny Awards—I mentioned it in the last editorial, but it bears repeating. Join us Sunday July 28th at Across the Board Game Cafe (accessible and licensed) for our wrap party/awards show. We will have 13 crazy categories to celebrate as many shows as we can fit in. The crowd decides who should win, as determined by crowd noise carefully analyzed by our human sound meters. The winner can make a short acceptance speech and receives one of the highly coveted hand sewn Jenny Awards. Winners must be present to accept. Doors open at 9:30pm and the show will start at 10ish. I hope to see you there!

The 13th Jenny Award, an Ass Backward Category—The Instagram polls for our previously mentioned Ass Backwards category started on Friday and included:

  • ImproVision: Nicolas Cage Match
  • Buying Bacon
  • Love, Death + Rascals
  • Letters from a Space Girl in Love
  • A One Human Being, Potentially Comedic Performance of The Nightmare Before Christmas
  • House of Gold
  • Nuit
  • The Mailroom

so vote for your favourite. Due to an unfortunate auto-correct, and a poor editing job by me, Nuit is listed as ‘Unit’. The winner will be added to list of contenders for a special Jenny Award. A big thank you to everyone who liked and shared our lovely Jenny’s adventures on Instagram.

-Murray Hunter

And now another column from Ray Yuen…

I deflowered more than a dozen virgins this past week!

Fringe virgins, that is.

I want to take a second to thank great friends for coming out and seeing/supporting my show (check out the SSPs!). Talking with those friends, I found out that many of them were Fringe virgins. They came to see the show because of me, but otherwise, they have never, and would never see a Fringe show.

“Why not?” is the obvious question. I expected the usual answers:

  • I’m too busy.
  • Summers are short and we want to get away.
  • It’s just not my thing.
  • Never comes onto my radar.

Surprisingly, the most common answer I heard was:

  • I thought it was just all weird stuff I wouldn’t understand!

They enjoyed my show because there was nothing to get or understand. It’s all laid out there—but I’m not the exception!

For all of you out there who never go to the Fringe because you think it’s weird or too deep to understand, that’s not true at all. Granted, you will encounter the occasional show where you leave wondering, “what the f__k just happened?” That’s a rarity. I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands of shows in my lifetime, and for most of them, I either leave with an emotional response, or teary-eyed from laughing. It’s seldom that I leave scratching my head—and if I do, so what? Did I have a good time? That’s all that counts. Even if I didn’t like it, I took a chance. You hear it all the time: TAKE A CHANCE! You never know what’s out there unless you try it.

If you’ve never seen a show, get out there and see some! At $10 to $14 a ticket, what do you have to lose? Where else can you get live entertainment for so little? Take a chance!

Ray Yuen
Jenny Review Coordinator