This show’s run is finished, which is a shame because I’d love for you all to see it.
Lise Vigneault, armed with not only Jim Carrey’s rubbery face but also a similar mischievous glint in the eye, brings several character onstage for a few minutes each to entertain. Entertain, they do. Funny, endearing, skirting with the edge of cliche but never going too far into that dark territory, we get song and dance and monologues: the usual one-person show fare.
Highlights were the interstitial video clips, Lise’s hard-working face and some great song arrangements that mingled humour with Lise’s solid vocal talents.
Too bad you can’t see it.
-fv
And there were.
Honestly, I’m not 100% sure what to write about this show. Describing it to you would be like trying to show you what La Pieta looks like by grabbing a pot of Play-Doh and squeezing it through the gaps in my crushing fist. But here goes.
There Will Be Lasers is a full sensory experience. The lights, the 80s-sci-fi-apocalyptic music, the spoken word that sounds like a science thesaurus read backwards, the smoke that fills the air and your nose, those beams of bright red lines tracing lines through the space of the theatre. And wandering through it all is the source of the voice, a shadowy spectre from beyond, never glimpsed but sensed as the faintest hint of a shadow, the outline of an LED-lined hood, a red flare where the laser has hit something, no, someone, that has halted its infinite journey through the cosmos.
I cannot remember seeing a show at the Fringe that will leave such a lasting visual imprint on my memory. There is no real story here, no beginning, middle and end. There is a series of impressions. There is no musical opus beyond the unrelenting waves of synth. There is no set design beyond the regimented arcs and flights of photons. The spoken word script, a charming mix of kooky and evocative, is delivered slowly, as though each word costs her a fortune in some otherworldly currency, by Sarah Claire while she traces steps only she can see in that semi-dark.
If you want to visit another dimension, to be immersed in some mind’s creation of artifice and delight, to exist in an entirely new way, go see the show that delivers on such a bold promise: There Will Be Lasers.
There is one last show on Sunday afternoon.
-fv
