One of this summer's most successful and acclaimed Fringe Festival performers, Jem Rolls is coming back to the Coast on Sept. 29, and he's gut wrenchingly hilarious!
Jem Rolls (that's his real name) is a performance poet. Last summer, his show received five star reviews from Montreal Gazette, Winnipeg Free Press, Edmonton Journal and Victoria's Monday Magazine and Times Colonist. It also received pick of the fringe in Vancouver, and CBC Radio One bought the entire show for national airing. Of his new show, Jem Rolls Off the Tongue, Now Toronto wrote: "A hilarious and unique approach to poetry makes Jem Rolls a must-see Fringe experience. He's like an intellectual Dr. Seuss on acid and has to be seen to be believed." Roll's first show was in 1993. He has since had over 1,950 paid performances worldwide in a wide variety of performance spaces including a sold-out performance at the Gumboot Garden Café in 2004.
Performance poetry has strange connotations of smoke-filled, beatnik speak-easies and long, boring, serious poems. Rolls' show "combines rapid-fire verbalism with a kinetic stage presence that will amaze," said Winnipeg Free Press. Spattering his words like spray paint, "he performs spoken word for people who hate spoken word and has administered a needle into the heart of the languishing poetry world." He is closer to a stand-up comic than a poet. Winnipeg Free Press said, "By using theatre, rock and roll, stand-up and mime, he has closed the gap between the stuffy world of poetry and contemporary audiences with frenetic, funny and, above all, populist verse."
Rolls said his show at the Gumboot was the most fun he'd had all summer - that the audiences here really "got it, they laughed at the bits most people miss." Jem Rolls Off the Tongue will play for one show only on Sept. 29 at 8 p.m. at Gibsons Heritage Playhouse. Tickets are available for $12 each in advance from Talewind Bookstore in Sechelt and Coast Books in Gibsons or $15 at the door.
