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dreamshark5:30 PM Alpha Come Home: A Bawdy Puppet and Clown Show
Presented by Margo McCreary at Ritz Theater
7:00 PM D20: It's How We Roll
Presented by Pan Dimensional Theater at Ritz Theater
Richard saw the first two on his own. He says that Alpha is very funny, and D20 is funny if you're a died-in-the-wool gamer but probably not if you aren't.
__________________
Meanwhile.... I fix my flat tire and pedal madly across town, through the herds of gawkers outside the Mill City Museum, across the Hennepin Bridge, and come screeching up to the Ritz Theater at approximately 8:28pm, just in time for one of the best shows of the Fringe!
8:30 PM Tom Thumb, or The Tragedy of Tragedies
Presented by Chopping Block and Charlie Bethel at Ritz Theater
I saw Charlie Bethel present the Epic of Gilgamesh last year, so I knew I wanted to see this one. He did not disappoint. This guy is incredible. Calling him a "story-teller" doesn't begin to cover it. Turns out that his material is not really a "fairy tale" after all; it's a hilarious, satirical, bawdy play by Fielding (author of Tom Jones). Bethel plays all the roles except for Tom Thumb, who is played by a potato. If there were a special award for the actor who delivers the most words in the course of his performance, Bethel would win by a landslide. Remember, he's doing all the dialogue of all the characters in a very wordy play. Likely it's abridged to fit into an hour, but he still has to talk and move at double-time to fit it all in, and he does it all with a Shakespearean delivery and without flubbing a line.
_______________________
10:00 PM The Cold, Dark Matter at Hand
Presented by The Electric Telescope Theatre Co. at Minneapolis Theatre Garage
It turns out to be surprisingly easy to get from the Northeast venues back to the Theatre Garage at Franklin and Lyndale. Just zip up Broadway to I-94 and exit at Lyndale. Bingo, there you are, with 20 minutes to spare. The show itself was ambitious, but very, very amateurish. However, it's so refreshing to see someone doing actual science fiction at the Fringe that we're glad we went just to give them a little more encouragement (the audience was not large). The story was kind of cool, except that the writer tried to jam so much into it that it became incoherent. If he'd left out about half the characters, dumped the "Goddess," and explained what all those people were doing on the rings it could have been a pretty good script. Some of the actors were pretty good. Some of them were terrible. Okay, it wasn't a very good show. But Sebastian Joe's is just up the hill, which is some compensation.
Presented by Margo McCreary at Ritz Theater
7:00 PM D20: It's How We Roll
Presented by Pan Dimensional Theater at Ritz Theater
Richard saw the first two on his own. He says that Alpha is very funny, and D20 is funny if you're a died-in-the-wool gamer but probably not if you aren't.
__________________
Meanwhile.... I fix my flat tire and pedal madly across town, through the herds of gawkers outside the Mill City Museum, across the Hennepin Bridge, and come screeching up to the Ritz Theater at approximately 8:28pm, just in time for one of the best shows of the Fringe!
8:30 PM Tom Thumb, or The Tragedy of Tragedies
Presented by Chopping Block and Charlie Bethel at Ritz Theater
I saw Charlie Bethel present the Epic of Gilgamesh last year, so I knew I wanted to see this one. He did not disappoint. This guy is incredible. Calling him a "story-teller" doesn't begin to cover it. Turns out that his material is not really a "fairy tale" after all; it's a hilarious, satirical, bawdy play by Fielding (author of Tom Jones). Bethel plays all the roles except for Tom Thumb, who is played by a potato. If there were a special award for the actor who delivers the most words in the course of his performance, Bethel would win by a landslide. Remember, he's doing all the dialogue of all the characters in a very wordy play. Likely it's abridged to fit into an hour, but he still has to talk and move at double-time to fit it all in, and he does it all with a Shakespearean delivery and without flubbing a line.
_______________________
10:00 PM The Cold, Dark Matter at Hand
Presented by The Electric Telescope Theatre Co. at Minneapolis Theatre Garage
It turns out to be surprisingly easy to get from the Northeast venues back to the Theatre Garage at Franklin and Lyndale. Just zip up Broadway to I-94 and exit at Lyndale. Bingo, there you are, with 20 minutes to spare. The show itself was ambitious, but very, very amateurish. However, it's so refreshing to see someone doing actual science fiction at the Fringe that we're glad we went just to give them a little more encouragement (the audience was not large). The story was kind of cool, except that the writer tried to jam so much into it that it became incoherent. If he'd left out about half the characters, dumped the "Goddess," and explained what all those people were doing on the rings it could have been a pretty good script. Some of the actors were pretty good. Some of them were terrible. Okay, it wasn't a very good show. But Sebastian Joe's is just up the hill, which is some compensation.
