Comprehensive coverage of Ottawa’s Fringe Festival
The singing, making up the other half of the show, was rich and lovely; Melanie Gall’s powerful voice rendered her microphone almost unnecessary and Bremner Duthie lit up his share of the tunes. The only weak point in the sung portion came when the two voices clashed as one singer tripped up the other in duet. Gall did her best to get the audience to sing along but most spectators were quite content to just listen to the superb voices.
So, if you go into this show expecting a theatre performance, you may end up kind of disappointed. As a storyteller, though, Murphy is excellent. And when Kuwaiti Moonshine is viewed as a told story, it is moving, inspiring, and often brilliant. This show is essentially a short story, told and acted by one individual, writer Tim C. Murphy. It contains elements taken from theatre, standup comedy, and (oddly- enough) self-help books, but it is, at its core, a literary/spoken word experience. Which is excellent, really, because the writing is fantastic.
