OSCAR girl gone wilde uses a series of short stories by Oscar Wilde to investigate the extremities of love and art and to connect audiences with a sense of lost innocence. With Joseph Shragge as outside eye, it was first presented in the Freestanding Room, as a fringe festival experiment in June 2017, and then in a spontaneous French translation at the 2019 Festival du Jamais Lu.
On the face of it, it’s a simple reading by Johanna Nutter, under Joseph Shragge’s direction, of three Oscar Wilde fairy tales. But the already elegant stories are further enriched by inventive little touches that make it a bittersweet commentary on lost innocence … At the end of the show, Nutter employs a simple but potent device (which we won’t give away here) that adds yet another layer of poignancy to this charmingly eccentric experiment.
BY JIM BURKE, MONTREAL GAZETTE, JUNE 9TH 2017
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Johanna Nutter’s multiple award-winning My Pregnant Brother showed previous Fringe audiences that as an actor, writer or producer, she’s not afraid of intimacy or sharing it with an audience … With no decor and few props, Oscar is stripped down to the story and the teller. We don’t need to sell you on Wilde’s words, but Nutter delivers them with often childish exuberance that pays tribute to three tales that sent her — and many generations of young girls and boys — to bed with thoughts of a better tomorrow. A much needed tonic in a world where selfish giants aren’t likely see the error of their ways, even after the garden is dead.
BY PETER WHEELAND, CULT MTL, JUNE 12TH 2017
A beautiful mix of theatricality and storytelling … at times it seems that as an audience, we are observers, but this is mixed with direct interaction and even “play” … The beauty of the piece is that I’m finding it nearly impossible to grasp how to summarize it in a review … Simply: did I like it? Yes. In fact, the more that I think about it, the more I love it and want to see it again. You should see it because the Wilde stories are great to hear. You should see it because it seems a very personal performance to Nutter, and you can’t see this anywhere else. You should see it because I find it really encapsulates the Fringe: minimalist intriguing theatre that is so rarely produced, yet so urgently fantastic to experience. Finally, you should see it because you’re never too old for a bedtime story.
BY RAHUL GANDHI, MONTREAL THEATRE HUB, JUNE 9TH 2017
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No one should be surprised if it finds its way off of the Fringe Festival and into a theatre company’s season in little time.
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BY DUSTIN FLEMING, THE LINK NEWSPAPER, JUNE 10TH 2017