Spiffing Stuff on Stage at the Edmonton Fringe

New Zealand actress Penny Ashton, 38, “magnificently” pulls off one-woman Jane Austen musical Promise and Promiscuity, on during August’s Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival.

Edmonton Journal reviewer Elizabeth Withey gives Ashton’s show 4.5 stars out of five describing the performance as, “a properly fun farce that pokes fun of the pompousness and classism pervading the age.” “

This high-energy parody centres on Elspeth Slowtree, a literary smarty-pants who at the ripe old age of 22 would rather write than play some dude’s ‘cabbage for a wife,’” Withey writes. “I don’t know what Ashton uses as fuel but it’s working; she’s full of vim and vigour with loads of accents and charming characters (snorting, unctuous cousin Horatio takes the prize, and Thomasina Jeggings is a close second). Lots of sexual innuendo and anti-French jokes to keep you tittering for the duration of the show.”

“Promise and Promiscuity bills itself as a musical, but it isn’t. It’s a play with a handful of parodied modern-day songs that pause the plot more than advance it rather than advance it. Promise and Promiscuity: most naughty and diverting. Spiffing.”

Ashton is also a wedding celebrant.