This has got to be one of the hippest, sweetest shows at the 2003 Fringe. Written by T.J. Dawe and Mike Rinaldi, and directed by Amiel Gladstone, Toothpaste and Cigars is a heterosexual almost-romance. Actually it is a romance but Chantry (played by Tallulah Winkelman) doesn't know it-or won't acknowledge it to the disappointed but resigned Wallace (Mike Rinaldi). Chantry and Wallace play out all the connecting games: talking about favourite movies, videos and foods, sharing scraps of trivia (including the fecal content, at death, of various personalities), composing fragments of poetry from fridge magnets, swapping confessions about zits, mono, old lovers. They click, they really click. But wait: what about Paul, Chantry's boyfriend?

This fast-paced show moves quickly through the intricacies of two people checking each other out; sometimes it repeats a scene with a different outcome. And now and again, we hear the inner workings of Wallace's brain: "Does Paul have a really big penis?" he asks Chantry, but not aloud. Funny, smart and honest, it's a bittersweet, postmodern ships-passing-in-the-night story made completely endearing and entertaining by understated but sweetly earnest Rinaldi and gleamingly effervescent Winkelman.

Jo Ledingham
Vancouver Courier

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