John Huston is Everywhere
// July 20th, 2007 // Blog, Kris's Soapbox
(reprinted from the CBC Performer Blog entry):
Patrick (my Churchill Protocol colleague) and I thought we had arrived in Winnipeg early. We had 24 hours to get from the end of our run at the Toronto Fringe to our media call and tech for our run at the Winnipeg Fringe, so we had to take a plane. Most of the bohemian touring crowd will drive between the two cities; these artists are easy to spot because they’re the ones with the dark circles under their eyes, a pent-up sense of rage over 16-hour stretches of driving, and a debilitating fear of moose.
We met our amazing billets (whom we are going to adopt as our own parents, with sincere apologies to our real ones) and headed right into the core of the city, where we discovered that we were not early at all. The MTC building was already plastered with posters, dollar stores all over the exchange district were bereft of packing tape and masking tape, and the advance tickets for TJ Dawe’s first show were already sold out.
The day before the festival began, then, ended up being a busy one. We slammed a quick breakfast as we mused on how even letters to the editor in the Free Press relate to the Fringe Festival. Then we high-tailed it to the print shop at 9 AM to pick up our posters, and eagerly began making Winnipeg unsightly. We ran into John Huston (he’s doing “Underneath The Lintel” this year) in the MTC lobby, and he welcomed us to town. We hung up some posters, running into Cara Yeates (“Bye Bye Bombay”) and Gemma Wilcox (“The Honeymoon Period Is Officially Over”) as we go. On Main Street, we bumped into John Huston again; he was busy welcoming other people to town and talking about the best paces to grab lunch. We grabbed lunch. We went to our media call at noon, where the Jenny Revue, CBC, and the Free Press all asked us repeatedly to “make that funny face again” so they could get a picture of it. Then we ran into the scout-like John Huston on Albert Street, kindly helping the frail and infirm across the road.
Shortly before our technical rehearsal, Patrick and I got lost in the underground. We needed more tape, you see, and we were sure there was an office supply store down there three years ago. We made our way above ground (without tape, natch) with just enough time to catch the erudite John Huston give a brief speech on particle physics to a hot dog vendor, and then ran off to our theatre.
We have always been blessed with fantastic theatre technicians, and our techs here in Winnipeg have raised the bar for techs everywhere. These men and women are an efficient army — many have been personally trained by John Huston — who have to manage as many as ten different plays in a single theatre space. They do it with a smile on their faces, even though some theatre companies arrive with technical requirements that would make Andrew Lloyd Weber blush. We managed to get through our three-hour technical rehearsal in about two hours, and so we already owe our techs a beverage.
Patrick and I finished the evening on the patio of the local pub, dodging insects, meeting up with other touring artists, and basking in the glow of watching John Huston put out a small housefire singlehandedly while saving the lives of six people, two cats, and a raccoon that happened to be in the back yard putting up posters for Jem Rolls.
The Fringe starts in earnest today — perhaps we’ll see you at the Free For All this afternoon! We’re looking forward to another amazing festival, and while we know there are some heavy hitters you’ve heard buzz about, we hope you’ll check out some of the touring shows that you may not have heard about yet but that we have seen in other cities and really liked: Die Roten Punkte (at Venue 18), The Fugue Code (Venue 4), Jesus in Montana (Venue 3), Bye Bye Bombay and Dickens of the Mounted
(Venue 8), Teaching As You Like It (Venue 11), The Honeymon Period is Officially Over and Deep Fried Curried Perogies (Venue 2), Giant Invisible Robot (Venue 5), Kafka And Son (Venue 6)… and Underneath The Lintel (Venue 21), which stars the indefatigable real-life Spirit of the Fringe, John Huston.
