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ENTERTAINERS

Frank Olivier Juggles "On The Edge"

Frank Olivier, his "Sugarbabies" and "Tonight Show" credits behind him, wants to be more than an entertainer. With his new one-man show, "On The Edge," he becomes an artist.

Inspired at the 1986 Edinborough Theatre Festival, Olivier has spent the better part of the last two years writing a script and developing new skills for this show. The plot is semi-autobiographical, with Olivier looking for balance between security as a successful night club comedian and personal growth as a performing artist.

Earlier this year, "On The Edge" had single performances at both the Palm's Playhouse in Davis, Calif., and the Julian Morgan Theater in Berkeley. In April, Olivier took the show to the Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Ore., for a threeweek shakedown run. But it sold so well that he was held over for an extra three weeks. Small wonder! There's a little bit of everything in this two-hour romp on stage - modern dance, Shakespeare, illusion, ballet, rock and roll, and lots of juggling.

Olivier's very popular night club act keeps popping up throughout the show

ping-pong ball mouth juggling, funny three and five club routines and torches atop a giraffe unicycle. There are plenty of new routines as well. The piece entitled "Frank's Room" allows for cavorting through a sea of Squeez -Its, with as few as one and as many as nine balls firing at a time. During part of the routine, Olivier bounds around on a bungee cord hanging from the ceiling.

The finale will take any juggler's breath away. In a "synthesis of old and new," Olivier rides a tall uni and juggles three balls while playing "Innagaddavida" on electric guitar. Then he trades the balls for two torches and plays the finale while balancing the guitar on his chin.

But he does more than just juggle. In an inspired piece, he performs the famous

"To be or not to be..." soliloqy of Shakespeare's "Hamlet" as it might be staged by Andrew Lloyd Weber. He also reveals that the difference between a ballet dancer (who, "no matter how bad, will always be called an artist") and a juggler ("who is forever lumped with bad mimes") is merely the leotard. His ensuing unicycle ballet - complete with jetes, plies, and flying leaps - Would bring tears of laughter to Mikhail Barishnikov.

The modern "Dance/Juggle of Life," a life-size puppet tribute to the Andrews Sisters, and a routine in which a garbage can serves as a metaphor for the velvet trap of success, both delighted audiences.

In the truest artistic tradition, Olivier takes risks in the show. Rather than present just another practiced routine, he attempts a conceived but untried trick or two each performance. The nightly feature is called the "Uncle Frank Show." Some of the bits so far include juggling balls while doing a shoulder stand in the lap of a volunteer, some gymnastics with another audience member, balancing stacks of odd objects found under the stage, and peeling and eating a banana while juggling.

From the successful Portland run, Olivier took the show to the New Vaudeville Festival in San Francisco in June. His producer is currently negotiating for an extended run of "On The Edge" either in San Francisco or Los Angeles. When the show, and Olivier, are ready, they'll move on to New York and offBroadway, following in the wake of the success of the Flying Karamazov Brothers and Avner "the Eccentric" Eisenburg. He could take the Big Apple by storm!

(David Levesque has been telling the IRS for years that he's a professional entertainer and free-lance writer living in Portland , Oregon - where they know how to brew beer!)