If you glance at a festival program, you’ll notice that Wonderbar! is meant to be featuring Alex Dallas, a veteran fringe performer. Show up to a performance however, and you’ll see Celeste Sansregret gracing the stage. “I wrote and produced Wonderbar! and Alex Dallas was going to come on the tour and do it,” said Celeste when we caught up to her at the Montreal Fringe. “Alex has done the fringe for a very long time and is a very dynamic and well-respected one-woman show performer. Ten days ago she decided she just couldn’t go on the road for four months this summer. So as the producer the fringe slot on the tour is mine, and I had the choice of losing my shirt or doing the show.”

Tough choice, but the show must go on. “I couldn’t find a replacement - I’m doing the national tour: opening in Montreal, doing Ottawa, Winnipeg, Toronto and Edmonton.” Stepping in at the last minute, Celeste has had to quickly get up to speed not just as the producer of the show, but as the principal actor. “I premier in Montreal on Saturday night. I think for the first two nights in Montreal I’ll be doing a heavily-staged reading of it; I’m close, I won’t have my face in the book, I’ll have a music stand, and a set, and it’ll be blocked, costumes, changes, music… by the time I get to Ottawa, there will be no book.”

Like many fringe veterans, Celeste has a high opinion of fringe festival. “I think this is a very pure experience of theatre, it’s incredibly democratic, I really like the uncensored aspect of it. When you go to do a film project, by the time the lawyers, the producers, the sponsers and the advertisers and everybody’s finished, the show looks nothing like what it started as. You’re re-written to death by committee. But here, you write it, you go, you do it.”

The fringe also has a special meaning for Celeste, as she met her fiance, fellow veteran fringe performer John D. Huston, on the fringe in 2006. “The fringe changed my life. The fringe was the place I did the first play I ever wrote, the fringe introduced me to my fiance, the fringe took me back to working in theatre after ten years of largely working as a writer and story editor for film and television.”

What does she enjoy most about the fringe? “It’s all on you, for better or worse. It’s very challenging, but it’s incredibly gratifying. Whether my show’s good, or whether it sucks, at least it’ll be the show I wrote as opposed to a show that was re-written by committee.”

Wonderbar! by Celeste Sansregret, opens in Ottawa on June 22 with performances through to June 29. More information on the show can be found on Celeste’s website.