BAD GIRLS: Sunny Side Up
by Chandra Mayor | Saturday July 21, 2012

Rating:

Company: The Roguespeare Players, Calgary, AB

Genre: Comedy

Venue: Venue #10 - Planetarium Auditorium

 

What happens when the self-proclaimed Bad Girls of the Fringe are also fierce and fearless performers with spot-on comedic timing, impressive physical comedy skills (including some playful burlesque), and armed with a series of savvy, in-your-face and killer-smart short scripts? One hell of a good show happens.

 

The show includes a monologue by Satan's mistress (and you'll be surprised at who holds the power - and just how it's wielded); a Shel Silverstein-inspired ad for services on offer by a duo of sexually and linguistically confident working women; and a Tupperware/babysitting negotiation between two housewives that would leave all four Dragons' Den moguls softly weeping. 

 

These characters are bad in all sorts of ways - trashy, provocative, foul-mouthed, and shameless. And in the hands of these extraordinary actors from Calgary, they're also powerful, unapologetic, hilarious, and totally authentic. Despite some uneven performances, the show holds together. The physicality and intelligence of Kearstin Plemel's performances are especially standout.  

 

Some of the audience seemed a little uncomfortable (perhaps they'd never heard a woman speak casually of anal-fisting before - in which case, it was probably high time they did).  But the rest of us were cheering and laughing out loud through this fast-paced and ridiculously fun hour.

Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION
Bad Girls: Sunny Side Up
Presented by: The Roguespeare Players, Calgary, AB
Venue 10: Planetarium Auditorium
Our Rating:

This five-woman troupe from Calgary (also presenting a darker show, Dangerous Curves) seems to be aiming for a tone of empowered, sexy, post-feminist chutzpah, but doesn’t quite achieve it, except in the saucy finesse of Bethany Holmes’ polished burlesque dance. There are nuggets of awesomeness here, but most scenes outstay their welcome (even though it runs shorter than the 75-minute time in the program).

The skit about shtupping Satan (the sole work not written by an outside playwright) is needlessly crude and even worse, totally unfunny, but Fred Stoppel’s Mamet-esque take on one-upping Tupperware ladies (“You dickin’ me?”) is wonderfully convincing, and Shel Silverstein’s bawdy Buy One, Get One Free is given a good-natured wink of a performance by Kearstin Plemel and Allisha Pelletier as bargaining prostitutes.

— Jill Wilson

 

---

Winnipeg Free Press - ONLINE EDITION
Bad Girls: Dangerous Curves
Presented by: Glamorgan Productions, Calgary, AB
Venue 12: Winnipeg Art Gallery - Muriel Richardson Auditorium
Our Rating:

In this series of dramatic sketches these girls are not bad in the Mae West sense. And that’s not good.

The Calgary quintet — who also perform in fringe comedy Sunny Side Up — present a quartet of campfire tales in which girls and women do bad things in an extremely earnest fashion.

An unhinged housewife chats up a twitchy stranger. A creepy female stalker’s histrionics lead to an obvious conclusion. A ghost haunts a bride for what seems like an eternity. And a trio of naughty schoolgirls play a bizarre, sexually charged game that would be hilarious if they just ramped up the camp in a finale that comes tantalizingly close to so-bad-it’s-good status.

— Pat St. Germain

These girls aren't bad enough
Bad Girls Rating

In theory, girls acting badly, not bad acting by girls, is the come-hither flag under which this collection of short plays and scenes gets hoisted by Calgary's Glamorgan Productions.

But in addition to the diverse forms of girl badness invoked here - murder, revenge, trash talk, sluttiness, burlesque - a few others are getting a workout inadvertently in Robert J. McLaughlin's production. Mugging, shrill one-note acting, pro-longed bouts of excruciating comical Irish accents, un-focused intensity, are among the offences on display. Some scenes are (way) more entertaining than others. Under the circumstances, the comic muse fares best.

You're entitled to approach with dread, in light of the opener Traces of Memory, a dogged Ann Wuehler sketch about two women, strangers, hitchhiking in the Nevada desert. One (Kearstin Plemel) is young and snarly, and snaps "Fine! What-ever!" sarcastically a lot.

The other (Wendy Froberg) is older, chattier, and more confessional. OK, what dark secrets have brought them here? "We both want to stay here for different reasons," explains the older woman helpfully. "We've got this stretch of nowhere to get lost in." Couldn't agree with her more.

Phrases like "the ritual evisceration of the beloved object" follow, courtesy of Don Nigro's portentous and overwritten The Dead Wife, in which a woman is visited by the ghost of her intended's ex-wife on the eve of her wedding. "Love is the most exquisite form of cannibal-ism." Yikes. No wonder the actors look stultified.

Of the comic pieces, Jeff Goode's F***!* Satan and Shel Silverstein's Buy One, Get One Free are the most amusing. In the former, we meet an exasperated hot-tie (Allisha Pelletier) who knows, from experience, that hot sex with the Devil isn't everything it's cracked up to be. The latter is an infomercial, in rhyming doggerel, by two enterprising red-light ladies (Plemel and Pelletier). Otherwise, these bad girls need to be either better, or a whole lot worse.