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Fringe Festival – Closing Weekend

August 13th, 2010

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is wrapping up this week. We’ll be resuming more normal operations around these here parts next week, but I wanted to share with you my reviews for the three best shows I’ve seen at the Festival this year. All of them have performances remaining this weekend, and I heartily encourage you to seek them out if you can.

BALLAD OF THE PALE FISHERMAN

This show was so profoundly moving; so ethereally beautiful; so flawlessly perfect that I grabbed a fistful of postcards as I left the theater and spent the rest of the day enthusiastically handing them out to anyone who would listen to me.

It’s that good.

As a theatrical event, Ballad of the Pale Fisherman takes a page from the minimalist staging of Our Town and the lyrical majesty of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milkwood. But within that broad form it creates its own uniquely beautiful visual vocabulary and transcendent audio landscape. From the first moments of the show you are subtly and powerfully immersed into the richly detailed and mythic world of the play while the cast simultaneously creates a panoply of characters, each intimately drawn and immensely memorable.

The tale itself is like a soap bubble jewel: So infinitely faceted; so delicate; and so ephemeral. And the telling of the tale is masterfully woven, with sudden, almost imperceptible transitions from tragedy to comedy and back again, with each flip of the switch tying you ever tighter to the characters and drawing you ever deeper into the narrative.

It brought tears to my eyes and hope to my heart.

And in the end I was propelled from my seat into a standing ovation, possessed by the kind of raw theatrical energy and passion that is so rarely achieved, but so utterly transforming when it’s experienced.

Shows like this are what make theater worth watching.

SEE YOU NEXT TUESDAY

Two hours after seeing See You Next Tuesday, we were still talking about it.

The script is nuanced and complex. It refuses to hold your hand or package up a preconceived message. It defies simplistic analysis.

Which makes it infinitely rewarding.

Each character is a completely realized and fully-rounded human being. It means that you can’t just tag them as “The Nice Guy” or “The Bad Girl”. And there’s no one you can point to and say, “That’s the guy I’m supposed to like!” (Particularly since the two main characters are locked in a completely caustic and dysfunctional relationship.)

The ridiculously talented cast latches onto this rich dramatic fodder and turns it into a theatrical feast.

Funny. Provocative. Thoughtful. Clever. Painful. Entertaining. Meaningful. Deep.

Like a fine wine upon the tongue, See You Next Today will linger in your mind.

UNDERNEATH THE LINTEL

Underneath the Lintel is one of the crown jewels of this year’s Fringe Festival.

First you have the script. It starts off endearing, transitions rapidly to clever, turns suddenly enthralling, and then transforms itself into something transcendentally operating simultaneously on multiple levels.

Second you have the actor. Heading in a one-man Fringe show the default assumption is that you’re going to see someone portraying themselves (or someone much like themselves). But O’Brien is a gifted and talented actor who transforms seamlessly into the giddy excesses of the Librarian, helping to carry you along on the Librarian’s kaleidoscopic journey of discovery.

All of it simply WORKS on a deep, profoundly moving level.

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Minnesota Fringe

August 6th, 2010

The Minnesota Fringe Festival started last night and will be running through August 15th. I have an UltraPass this year, which means that over the 10 days of the festival I’ll be seeing 40+ shows. So things are going to slow down a bit here at the Alexandrian for the duration.

On the other hand, I’m planning to be an active Fringe reviewer. You’ll be able to check out my reviews on the Fringe Festival website, and I may play around with reposting some of them here as well. Here are a few samples.

ALEXANDER AT DELPHI – A SQUANDERING OF GOOD MATERIAL

Many of the actors in Alexander at Delphi spent the majority of the show with their gazes locked on the lone conductor stationed offstage left. Despite disrupting any real chance the show had for chemistry, pace, or immersion, I found I couldn’t really blame them: There wasn’t anything on the stage worth looking at.

The music itself is intriguingly possessed of Greekish overtones, but is largely undistinguished. (Literally. You can’t distinguish one song from the next as they blend together into a kind of sub-symphonic mush.) In addition, the music and the lyrics appear to be locked in some sort of blood feud from which they both emerge as losers. (You can’t really make up for a lack of syllables in a lyric by trying to make one syllable do the work of four.)

I have a passing, but not particularly detailed knowledge of Alexander the Great and the accuracy of the history depicted is impressive. Unfortunately, it often takes the form of historical bullet points serving as dialogue and characters narrating their own biographies.

And although faithful, the script also manages a fair degree of incoherency. For example, Alexander and Hephaestion are first introduced to us as they are roleplaying Achilles and Patroclus during the Trojan War. But this is never actually explained, leaving the audience at least momentarily confused as to which characters these actors are actually depicting. The play also has a habit of jumping backwards and forwards through time, but frequently doesn’t give the audience any meaningful clue where or when they are.

And please stop stabbing the floor with your bendy, plastic swords.

What should be singled out for praise, however, are the many actors who struggle mightily to entertain. Particularly notable is the performance of Brandon Osero, who frequently brings a breath of fresh energy to the otherwise weary proceedings.

1 KITTY

COMMUNOPOLY – INCESSANTLY CLEVER SATIRE

Communopoly succeeds at being much more than the polemic it could have easily become in less talented hands: Instead, it presents itself in a series of complex and multifaceted (and funny!) layers, peeling them back one at a time for our enjoyment.

First, the show makes the game of Monopoly comes alive. And it’s funny. It’s like the movie Clue, except it’s Monopoly and it was written by Monty Python.

Second, it puts up a mirror and forces us to really look at the ideological underpinnings of the game through the lens of communism. And somehow it’s still funny.

And finally they turn the mirror back on themselves for one last bit of self-deconstruction.

And it’s still funny.

The show’s not perfect: It can be a little rough around the edges. But it’s entertaining, clever, and rewarding.

4 KITTIES

RACHEL TEAGLE BELIEVES IN GHOSTS

Watching Rachel Teagle Believes in Ghosts was like sitting around a campfire listening to ghost stories. Except instead of your goofy friends, the tales are being told by a talented and gifted storyteller.

Mixing “real” ghost stories with a collection of original tales, Teagle succeeds brilliantly at exploring the full range of spectral tale-telling: Haunting. Scary. Nostalgic. Painful. Funny.

Unfortunately, the show does occasionally fall down. In particular, the interpretive dance portions of the evening were complete failures for me. And while Teagle is to be commended for the innovation of including guest storytellers at each of her performances, the timing of the guest performer was mystifying to me: Coming immediately after what was, arguably, the high point of the performance, the guest performer (despite his quality) nevertheless seemed to turn the last portion of the show into an anticlimax.

In a perfectly calibrated world, I would probably give this show 3.5 or 3.75 kitties. But since it succeeds far more often than it fails, I’m quite happy to round that figure up to 4 entertaining kitties.

4 KITTIES