ORLANDO SENTINEL AND ORLANDO WEEKLY SAY ONWARDS! IS PICK OF THE FEST!
Orlando Weekly:
“deliriously delicious delight” and
“indescribable combination of pitch-dark stories and sunshiny songs"
Dr Bartolf’s Regina Fringe Reviews:
“My strongest recommendation of this year’s Fringe. Such a great, energetic, entertaining show”
Ottawa Fringe Reviews:
“Bremner is a consummate performer with the wonderful gift of making an audience feel in safe hands. …he takes the audience on a rambling stroll through art, revolution, and joyful defiance with the energy of court jester pausing mid caper to quote Diogenes. This is quite simply what Fringe is about.”
Winnipeg Free Press:
FOUR STARS! " LOVED IT! Song-and-dance and neo-vaudeville cabaret for a weary world. Bremner Fletcher is a bass-baritone opera singer who has crafted a hardscrabble, 60-minute valentine to survival. Shining and flowing from Fletcher’s deep, emotion-filled voice, this collection of pop and Tin Pan Alley tunes rings improbably in the ear like a pop tenor. Imagine if Chris Rea, Nick Lowe, Kurt Weil, Attila the Stockbroker, Ian Dury and Nick Cave were one dude in a nice-fitting suit…"
buy tickets for onwards!
Onwards!
Orlando Weekly: "Self-described 'opera busker anarchist' Bremner Fletcher Duthie always wanted to sing and act, but he’d almost abandoned his art after endless dispiriting auditions, until his wife encouraged him to perform a one-man show at “one of those weird festivals.” Twenty-five years later, Bremner gratefully credits Fringe with saving his life, and he’s repaying the debt by delighting Orlando audiences with his indescribable combination of pitch-dark stories and sunshiney songs.
Dressed in a grey pinstripe suit with a vibrant yellow shirt and scuffed Converse, surrounded by foot-trigger floor lamps, Duthie introduces Onwards! with a string of original songs that sound at first like they could have slipped out of the 20th century’s Great American Songbook. But upon a closer listen, they overflow lyrically with mischievously mixed metaphors, merging carnival claptrap and the Egyptian Book of the Dead with Warner Bros’ disturbingly prescient 1977 shareholder statement … and that’s just in the first 20 minutes.
Like an old-timey crooner with an operatic baritone, Duthie is equally at home standing behind a vintage microphone stand or showing off his dynamic clown-like physicality in front of it. He’s stressed out about social media, the rise of A.I. and the decline of American democracy; he expresses his anxieties in the form of a toe-tapping blues tune,or a Suno-generated anthem to the absence of choice. Whether he’s performing a Gilbert and Sullivan patter paean to his patron’s perverse peccadillos or whistling a gentle ballad written for his late mother, Duthie encourages his audience to make the choices that make you happy and move defiantly onward, no matter what our sociopathic tech-bro overlords might do.
In these crazy times that we live in, it’s easy to feel like you’re always at the wrong time and in the wrong place. But Duthie’s deliriously delicious delight of a show reminds us that if we’re all in this mess together, we might as well sing along while our shipwreck of a world slowly sinks beneath the waves."
ONWARDS! at the Edmonton Fringe: How to go onwards and fight the madness of the crazy modern world that is holding us back?? Bremner Fletcher uses dark comedic storytelling + virtuoso singing to give us hilarious and thoughtful lessons in how to defeat the powers ranged against us.
Bremner says, ‘ONWARDS’ follows in the tradition of work that I’ve been doing for 20 years. Over the past decades, I have been exploring New Cabaret, creating performance pieces that are an emotional collage of ideas and songs. Critics have said "Duthie is a baritone with operatic scope; instead of mere interludes, the songs become weapons”—See Magazine, Canada.
ONWARDS is a solo performance about how marvelous it still is to be human in our all-too-artificial world. ONWARDS has songs that are funny until they’re suddenly not, and occasionally profound until they’re suddenly stupid. Monologues that shift from irreverent comedy to tender confession. Anarchic, sometimes sentimental, sometimes sweary, part stand-up, part cabaret, performed with 100% human artifice. Somewhere between concert, therapy session, and existential tantrums. I’m looking for connection, engaged laughter, and music, to help us deal with the fact we’re all just muddling through this absurd business of being human.
Times like ours demand all the emotional authenticity we can muster, because the news headlines have become their own form of insanity.