As a Fringe reviewer, it is always nice to read something in a program that acknowledges the challenges of creating the play in question. In the words of Charlie Fink, producer of Who’s Your Baghdaddy? Or How I Started The Iraq War, talking about the original screenplay written by JT Allen: [Read more...]

In the director’s notes, director/writer/performer Michael Oliver quotes Archibald MacLeish: “A poem should not mean/but be.” I would add, “Or be performed”.

[Read more...]

What do the women do while the men are at war?

It is this question, asked in the midst of an all-out musical and visual spectacle, that drives director Tracey Elaine Chessum’s production of The Many Women of Troy. And I mean ‘spectacle’ in every sense of the word. After watching the first fifteen minutes, you may find yourself opening up the program to see if Timothy Leary acted as a consultant at any point in this play’s development. This wasn’t a bad thing; just not what I was expecting at all. [Read more...]

The imaginative team behind Fringe 2010′s hit iSchool Musical returns to Fringe with a hilarious new show, iToonsical.  Based on the idea of an animated movie musical (think Disney or “South Park”), the characters in the show they created when i was there was a completely improvised musical were all animals.  [Read more...]

I haven’t been to many Fringe shows that ended with everyone in the audience asking for a picture of the performers. Then again Hello, Hedgehogs! deviates from the norm in a bunch of ways. Its solo performer, Ellie Shinman, must not have heard the dictum “never share the stage with small children or live animals!” Or if she did, she let it be one more rule to be broken. [Read more...]

Should the N word ever be used? Does the meaning of the word change in different contexts?  Should the word be embraced or eliminated from our modern vocabulary? These questions frame Quinn Alston’s The N Word?, an exploration of the beliefs, opinions, myths and history behind to N word from the African American perspective both within and outside of their communities. [Read more...]

Not everything at the Fringe Festival is “hungry” – produced on a dime for the sheer joy of creating live theatre. F#@king Up Everything (let’s call it FUE), in spite of what the title conjures up, comes to us with a list of support personnel that fills one entire page in the program. These folks know how to put together a musical and they are deadly serious about doing it right. [Read more...]

Every Night I Die is a tragic tale of love and loss. It deals in a delicate subject matter that leads to jaw-dropping dramatic moment. Playwright Amanda Andrei spins the story with just the right amount of twists and turns within an hour’s time. The actors have the challenge to fill that range from the antihero, the temptress, and the benevolent wife to the raging brother. [Read more...]