Nerd alert: if “it’s only a flesh wound” makes you giddy, this news is for you. Monty Python’s Spamalot is coming to the Metro Centre for three performances, Saturday, October 16 at 2pm and 8pm, and Sunday, October 17 at 2pm. Back in 2005, the theatrical adaptation of the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail won a fistful of Tony awards and it’s been touring ever since, making geek-boys happy everywhere. Tickets ($52.50-$68.50) go on sale Friday, August 27 at 9am, 451-1221/ ticketatlantic.com.

• Is this a busker? According to the festival, it's not.

Along with cash for its performers, the enjoyment and expectations of audiences, the Halifax International Busker Festival raises a perennial question: Who is a busker?

For Kim Hendrickson, president of ESP Productions, the company that puts on the festival, a busker performs a “circle show. Then they pass a hat,” she says on the phone, away from the hustle and bustle. But, she goes on to explain, a performer must possess more than will and even skill. For one, an act or performance is “scripted” and rehearsed, a point she makes a few times during discussion. “There has to be a show to it,” Hendrickson says. “Just because someone has skill doesn’t mean they can put on a show.”

Other people busk and understand busking, in an informal, unofficial way, as a matter of travelling and jobbing and not performing as part of a sanctioned schedule.

“Busking is selling your art through performance on the street,” says Victor McLean, an Ottawa native who arrived last week to spend some time in Halifax. “It’s street-level.” He’s just packing up his guitar after finishing another “shift” outside the Halifax Ferry Terminal.

“I write folky and jazzy stuff. It’s all clean. I don’t believe in cursing in music,” explains McLean, adding with a mix of pride and surprise at himself: “I just wrote a folk song in English and French.” The 28-year-old hitchhiked here. Crossing Quebec especially influenced him. “I met all these really great francophone people,” says McLean. “All the people I met I immortalized in a song.”

He didn’t know the Busker festival was going on before he arrived, but he’s enjoying the atmosphere and the friendly support he’d received by the mobile masses. “I don’t have a job. I wanted to live off busking for the summer. I’m a registered chef: I don’t need to do this,” says McLean, who graduated from Niagara College. “I can just show my papers and my resume and can probably be working in a kitchen again in a day.”

As a busker, McLean believes each gig is a rehearsal for the next one. He got into busking as an act of “tough love.” After starting to play stages back in the nation’s capital, an acute anxiety kept him from playing. “I started busking and cured myself of stage fright,” he says, smiling. Busking provided the necessary nerve tonic, but also needed travel funds. McLean came to Halifax to see the Atlantic Ocean, explore the Ovens and visit Oak Island.

Festival performers include seven acts from Australia (the largest contingent of the 19 on the slate), have their return flights and hotel accommodations in Halifax paid for thanks to event sponsors, writes ESP event manager Christina Edwards.

• Heather Watts
• Shawn Duggan as Ray and Kathryn McCormack as Una in Blackbird.

British playwright David Harrower's Blackbird was on Richie Wilcox's wishlist, so he jumped at the chance to return to Halifax to direct the play for Angels & Heroes Theatre Company, opening August 9 at the The Living Room (2353 Agricola Street).

"I'm a fan of darker, grittier scripts that push the boundaries," says Wilcox, a founding member of A&H, who now lives in Toronto while working on his PhD—he has his masters in theatre directing from Texas State University. He's a big fan of British playwrights, who don't shy away from "in-your-face theatre." Wilcox is all for tackling issues on stage—anyone who saw A&H's memorable Fewer Emergencies in 2008, starring Garry Williams, Ann Doyle and Stewart Legere—can attest to that fact.

Blackbird, which features Shawn Duggan, Kathryn McCormack and Clara Bullock, is the story of a couple who meet again after a forbidden relationship that took place 15 years ago. "We all have someone who haunts us every day of our life that we can't escape," says Wilcox. Given the nature of the script and the issues that it dives into, Wilcox says it's an extremely intimate script for the performers. "It's hard to get rid of," he says. "It seeps into friendships and relationships, and makes you uncomfortable." Rest assured though, Wilcox says there's dark humour keeping it all afloat.

Once the run is over, Wilcox will head back to Toronto, but look for him next summer assistant directing alongside Daniel MacIvor.

Blackbird runs August 10-15, 8pm, with a pay-what-you-can on August 9 and a 2pm matinee on August 15. Tickets are $10; reserve ahead by calling 223-5371.

Don’t let the plot fool you: Splinters is not based on a true story. It’s just a story that happens to be true.

“The actual events of the play are not autobiographical,” insists playwright Lee-Anne Poole. “Besides the fact that, you know, I have experienced some of them.”

She calls Splinters, opening at the Plutonium Playhouse (July 8-25, Tuesday-Sunday $15-$20, 423-4653), a “fortune-teller” for her life: it’s about a lesbian, Belle, who has secretly been dating a man for over a year. Poole, who until recently considered herself a lesbian, began writing the play years ago while dating a woman. It was only after finishing both the script and relationship that she too began seeing a man—-and, like Belle, it’s been over a year. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the validity of sexuality and how much people’s identity relies on that,” Poole says. “I felt like I was betraying or hiding a side of myself when, suddenly standing next to a man, you’re automatically assumed totally straight.”

That’s Belle’s problem in Splinters. Prompted by her father’s death, Belle returns to visit her mother in Sambro, Nova Scotia (where Poole’s own mother lives—-still not autobiography, though). Belle brings her beau, but she hides their romance from her mother, worried about proving her right—-maybe the whole “lesbian thing” was just a phase after all. “It’s less about just blanketed homophobia,” Poole explains, “and more about where I think sexuality is going, where sexuality is splintering off, and it doesn’t so much matter whether you’re straight or gay or bi, and people are just attracted to people.”

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy for straight folk to (mostly) fill the production. Three out of the show’s four actors are straight (including Stephanie MacDonald as Belle), as well as the director, Simon Bloom.

“Ultimately, whether or not it is a play about sexuality, it is a play about human beings,” Bloom says. “Not being able to be heard and not being able to be understood is something that people experience regardless of sexuality.”

That’s why Bloom finds it so easy to bring out other themes in the play, like what he calls the show’s “undercurrent of scopophilia.” Imagine, onstage, walls of a house made of long, broken-up pieces of thin wood, and characters shadowed in the background, watching the action before them.

“It’s still a naturalistic play,” Bloom says. “It just has elements of storytelling that are not naturalistic.”
Call it naturalistic if you want. Poole prefers to call the style one “where things are shitty and hard and they suck, but lots of funny stuff happens.” In summary: “It really is just real life.”

Just not her life. Sort of.

• Julé Malet-Veale
• The Common director Dustin Harvey wants inside your head.

Warning: You may feel totally self-conscious as a spray of water tickles your face, which is pressed against the metal fence surrounding the fountain in the Common. But the voice telling you to stand there is kind but firm in its instructions. Hold on though, you’re off on a fantastical ride.

The Common: An Experience For One Person In A Public Place is a site-specific play presented on an iPod that takes individuals on a journey from the North Common, up Bell Road to the Public Gardens, ending at Victoria Park. Secret Theatre director Dustin Harvey, whose previous productions include Winding Up Godot (performed with wind-up toys) and Cowboy Show (hosted in an old trailer), is known for subverting traditional theatre conventions like space, location and audience intimacy.

Harvey knew that he wanted to do a performance using an iPod, and certainly there isn’t a more polarizing piece of land in the city on which to base a site-specific story. “We’re living in a time where the Common’s role is fuelled by debate—-what is its best use?” Harvey asks rhetorically, sitting in a lawn chair by the fountain. A green flag marks the beginning of the play, where Harvey hooks up participants with an iPod, a guidebook, pencil and a pin to flash at people in case they want to talk.

The Common is written by former Coast contributor Rob Plowman. “He took the idea of myth and folklore as his inspiration,” says Harvey, with themes of “history, place and identity.” But as history is not a static concept, Plowman deftly bleeds current news and urban tales (random violence) with facts (skating at Egg Pond), locations (the Citadel) and prominent figures (Samuel Cunard). Don’t expect a straightforward narrative; sometimes the voice tells a story; occasionally you’re presented with a task, or asked to search for a personal memory. “It’s a bit of a dream,” says Harvey. “How real is it? We blur and play, just a little bit. A lot happens in your imagination.”

It is particularly surreal journey on this lovely Tuesday night, as the fields are covered in teepees and striped carnival tents for the Membertou 400 powwow, while security guards lean against fences, eyeing passersby suspiciously. Even the Bengal Lancers horses seem to be in on the action, as instructions are given to quicken your pace. It looks like you’re doing a trot. “Certain things are triggered, some aren’t,” says Harvey mysteriously. “Sometimes those serendipitous entrances seem to be on cue.” By the time you reach the end, you may feel exhilarated or subdued, or like you’re coming off a peyote high.

The Common runs from July 1 to 11, from 6.30pm to dusk. It’s free, but admission is appointment only. Email secrettheatre@gmail.com with the day you’d like to attend and a phone number. For more information, visit foraslongasyouhavesofar.com.