Congrats to Orlando Fringe Festival Producing Artistic Director's Beth Marshall and her latest production, "L'Ange Avec Les Fleurs," now showing at the Next Stage Theatre Festival in Toronto. It's getting raves reviews, including the one below from Torontoist.
L'Ange Avec Les Fleurs is a genre-busting whirlwind, a production that blends circus, vaudeville, cabaret, puppetry, and narrative theatre in roughly equal proportions. We enter the theatre to find eight ragamuffin clowns already on stage, going through a set of pre-performance exercises that range from the predictable (stretches, vocal warm-ups) to the silly (butt-shaking features prominently). The fourth wall is nowhere to be found: in short order the audience is heckled, cajoled, made to sing, and yelled at by an officer of the Third Reich. The performers then set themselves to enacting a play-within-the-play, also (appropriately) named L'Ange Avec Les Fleurs. It's a classic tears-of-a-clown tale: France's beloved entertainer, Baptiste, finds himself beset by existential anxiety and decides to leave the big top in search of a more authentic life. As his adventures unfold, a sardonic, eyebrow-raising master-of-ceremonies/accordionist/war-resister provides a running commentary that is both sympathetic and piercing. We had some qualms about the ending (existentialist stories tend to wrap up rather predictably), but the two male leads are excellent, and the set is a miracle of ingenuity. L'Ange is not for traditionalists, to be sure, but it's a well-executed flight of fancy unlike anything else we've seen. Next performance: tonight at 8:15 p.m.