Fours Stars Out Of Five
Traditionally, standup comedy at the Fringe has been, at the very least, as dicey an entertainment pursuit as say, standup at your local shopping mall chain comedy club.
Vancouver's TJ Dawe kicks up the form - with a nod to storytelling, stunts (one, a good one performed several times) and the addition of savvy jazz percussionist Jason Overy - several notches in a performance that makes one wonder why the name isn't more familiar.
Part Lord Buckley, part Jerry Seinfeld, part... TJ Dawe, the guy is an original monologist who spins the everyday - working the minimum wage graveyard shift, the faces on stoplights, the anomalies of the English language, etc., into a sort of odd, slightly dark narrative that hangs together in its way, with plenty of laughs served up along the way.
Some of this seems on the pretentious side - the drummer thing, for example - but it all works for the most part. Here is a singular talent in a realm that sorely needs younger voices of this intelligence, wit and edge. Judging by this, we can expect even bigger and better things from Mr. TJ Dawe, who literally and figuratively marches to his own drummer.
Alan Kellogg
Edmonton Journal
Sunday, August 15, 1999
