Review: ALL REQUEST RADIO at the Ottawa Fringe Festival

A highlight of summer in the city, the Ottawa Fringe Festival held its official launch yesterday. The festival's 26th edition runs through June 25th, and provides a space where audiences can interact with artists and experience diverse theatre in intimate, accessible settings. This year’s festival features over 45 shows, including plays, musicals, dance, circus, burlesque, and more. Most shows are sixty minutes or less, making them easily digestible and allowing audiences to see more shows than they might otherwise be able to attend. At $12 plus fees per show, it is also an affordable way to experience a varied selection of live theatre. This year, the Fringe has incorporated an Assisted Listening system in certain venues to increase accessibility for all patrons.

For my first show at this year’s Fringe, I went to check out The Velvet Duke’s All Request Radio in the Atelier space of the Arts Court Theatre. During All Request Radio, the show’s host, DJ Velvet Painting, plays Ottawa's Top 10 ratio hits, as requested in real-time by the audience. Just before the show begins, the audience is invited to submit imaginary song titles through a QR code displayed on a screen. If selected, a song title is randomly paired with a style of music and DJ Velvet Painting sings the hit song by improvising lyrics that are in line with its title. The host is entirely unaware of what the song title and musical style will be until it appears on the screen. The selected titles were varied and, at times, even nonsensical, which just added to the fun; my personal favourite was “Chaos on Bank Street”.

True to the radio format, the show included advertisements (for other shows at the Fringe), traffic updates, and an in-studio interview with special guests, the Dangerous Dames. This allowed them to shamelessly plug their own upcoming show, Shelley and Lovelace Never Met, premiering tonight at the Fringe, but it also came at a cost. They agreed to improvise Dangerous Dames’ hit song “Dad, I’m Changing My Pronouns” live on the air, and it was predictably hilarious. In a plot twist, one of the Top 10 songs also ended up being “Dad, I’m Changing My Pronouns”, and DJ Velvet Painting stepped up to the plate with their cover of the Dangerous Dames’ classic that was so fresh in our minds.

All Request Radio provides live, simultaneous ASL-English translation at every performance. It also provides real-time AI-generated captioning on the screen, but the captions were mostly so far off-base and ridiculous that I started to think it was meant to be part of the joke.

DJ Velvet Painting has tons of charisma and ad-libbing songs from made up titles is an impressive feat. The show is pure, unadulterated fun and the audience loved it. If you want to laugh out loud for the better part of an hour, don’t miss your chance to tune in to All Request Radio at the Ottawa Fringe.

See below for upcoming dates and times, as well as each show's scheduled special guests. Click here to watch the trailer and read our recent interview with The Velvet Duke, where they talked about their inspiration for the show. You can purchase tickets to All Request Radio at the following link - here.

June 16, 2023	6:00 PM	Michael Lifshitz
June 17, 2023	4:00 PM	Maggie and Meghan
June 18, 2023	5:00 PM	Janelle Niles
June 21, 2023*	8:30 PM	Jinesea Lewis
June 22, 2023	11:00 PM	Josh Mayo
June 23, 2023	7:00 PM	Owen McGowan
June 24, 2023	9:00 PM	Kristen Scharf
*   Black Out Night

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