Fringed all weekend

[dreamshark]

This was the first time I've ever attended the Fringe Festival. It was fun, although not cheap. It's like ordering from an a la carte menu; the individual items don't seem that expensive, but by the time you've ordered a whole meal you've blown quite a wad. I'm just as glad we didn't start until the final weekend, as it can be quite addictive (like gambling or any other activity that provides intermittent reinforcement). We saw 3 things that were extremely good and two that were pretty dreadful. Somehow, this just whets one appetite for more. Fortunately, by that time it was Sunday night. From top to bottom (good to bad)

Emma Goldman: Love, Anarchy and Other Affairs - magnificent! Well written, exquisitely performed one-woman show.

Climax-the Final Four Play [Gremlin Theater] - 4 well-realized skits. The title doesn't mean anything except that there were four of them. Excellent work, much like Brave New Workshop at its best. Watch for this troupe next year.

Critters [NuVole Dance Company] - all-female dance troupe doing a sort of Pilobilus meets Cirque de Soleil. Gymnastics/dance, a lot of it hanging from trapezes and twining draperies. A clever "Wild Kingdom" framing device varied the pacing and kept the audience involved. Very very good, if you like that kind of thing (I do).

Ubu Roi. We went to this one because 1) The show we really wanted to see was sold out and 2)The main character of the book I just read took his name from this "classic" French play. If you really loved the Three Stooges and think that incomprehensible fake foreign accents are hysterically funny, this is the play for you. We hated it. However, the ASL translator was fantastic. It's not easy to keep up with an entire stageful of actors yakking away and falling all over each other at a constantly frenetic pace.

Boulevard of Broken Dreams: the Tiny Tim Story. This one was just plain embarrassing, especially since it was sincerely meant as a tribute to the late Tiny by one of his few serious fans. The less said the better.

Comments

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I saw Ubu Roi with a friend (uncle of one of the cast members) and thought it was fun. Of course, we were into our second pint o' Guinness too, which may have helped. No ASL though.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

No doubt about it, Guiness or something much like it would have improved the show tremendously. We made the mistake of ordering lemonade.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

It sounds like an entertaining weekend. I don't know much about the fringe festival. Is this open air theater?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

It's sort of like an unjuried art show, only with 1-act plays. Also dance, story-telling, and miscellaneous performance art. It's all indoors, at a number of different venues around town. Most of the pieces are 1 hour long.