Memories of Bonnie Scotland

It rained in Edinburgh. A lot. In fact, it was the rainiest year in over 100 years. Scotland is renowned for its soggy climate, so imagine how wet was. Rain on the castle, rain on the cobblestone streets and rain on the umbrellas of folk waiting in line to buy tickets for my show Whiskey Bars.

It was wet, soggy theatre madness. You think the Canadian Fringes are crazy – they have nothing on this elephant of a festival - over 2000 different theatre shows were performing. Which adds up to 19 000 (that's right - nineteen thousand!) performers wandering the streets trying to get audiences to come to their shows. Over the course of the three week festival around 1.7 million tickets were sold. And for our whole last week I watched the rain fall on my glorious sold-out line-ups… The average size for an audience at a show in Edinburgh is 8 people (that’s right, just Eight warm bodies), so a full house is a dream come true.

We arrived here on August 1st as an unknown Canadian one-man show. When we walked into our tiny venue we didn't expect much – it was seedy, to put it politely. A crumbling door at the end of a dank alleyway beside a gloomy ancient cemetery. The theatre is a 500-year-old vaulted church basement. Right next door is one of Edinburgh's least glamorous massage parlours, and on the other side armored cars bring in criminals to the Law Courts that sit high above. Reviewers have said complimentary things like "the seedy, dank atmosphere of the Vault creeps into every sinew of this performance".





I can't argue...but the locale was perfect for a one-man exploration of the music of Kurt Weill--composer of Mack the Knife. Weill basically invented a whole new style of music theatre in the 1920's, working with Bertold Brecht. I've been obsessed with Weill's music for years - I first heard his songs in a cabaret in East Berlin in the 1980's while living in a squat in West Berlin. How could I not fall in love after the glamour of squeaking through Checkpoint Charlie, sitting in a dank bar watching a cabaret show while drinking harsh Eastern Bloc vodka.

I first performed Whiskey Bars at the 2000 Toronto Fringe Festival. It took me years of touring, reworking the show and tweaking the script before I felt like it was good enough to bring to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. At the beginning in Edinburgh we played to audiences of three and four enthusiastic friends. We begged the folk who work in the theatres to come and check out the show, hoping to start some buzz. And amazingly, it worked. Britain's prestigious theatre mag, The Stage, dropped by & gave us a double thumbs-up: "Like Hedwig with far better melodies" they said. We got Five Stars from The Edinburgh Fringe Review, and Five Stars from Edinburgh's Broadway Baby Review. (you can read all the reviews here)

So, amazingly, for once, it worked. A little show wandered into town on a wing and a prayer, our whole gamble paid off (we even covered the cost of getting over there) the glowing reviews kept stacking up. The only question for the summer was, of course, could we handle any more British weather?

Whiskey Bars at Bread and Circus in Kensington Market every Tuesday at 8pm. Tickets $10.00 at the door, or through www.breadandcircus.ca





yes, that is a tea cozy....