✭✭✩✩✩

by the company, directed by Christopher Legacy

Spindrift, Toronto Fringe Festival, Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse, 79A St. George Street

July 6-15, 2017

This ill-conceived homage to American poet Hart Crane (1899-1932) is a confusing collage of theatrical techniques and subject matter.

The show’s greatest mistake is to assume that its audience is already familiar with Crane and his life. If you know that Crane was travelling by steamship with Peggy Cowley (Julia Porter), his only known heterosexual partner, but propositioned a sailor (Chai Lavie), was beaten up and committed suicide by throwing himself overboard, you will at least have a thread to help make some sense of the onstage antics.

The show’s main setting is the ship’s cabaret with the magnetic Shawn DeSouza-Coelho as the lascivious emcee. Yet flashbacks, sudden instrumental interludes, chats with the audience, boxing, a magic trick, karaoke, recitations of Crane’s poems, excerpts from letters to and from him and memories from the actors' own lives are so mixed up together that they obscure more than illuminate the poet’s life and work.

Show length: 55 min.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review appeared in NOW Magazine on July 7, 2017.

Photo: Julia-Porter, Chai Lavie and Shawn DeSouza-Coelho. ©2017 Christopher Legacy.

For tickets, visit https://fringetoronto.com.