Avenue Q asked the question, “What Do You Do With A B.A. In English?”

Historian Anthony Cohen asks the audience a similar question, “What do you do with a history degree?” In his one-man Fringe show, Patrick and Me, he attempts to answer the question. Lost and unsure of what he should do after college, Cohen went on a cross-country journey to not only uncover a hidden part of history, but to perhaps uncover his own identity  in the process. [Read more...]

If you’re looking for an evening of escapism and suspension of belief, A Wild Play is not the show for you. If you’re looking for an evening of contemplation and art that challenges you to do more than sit sponge-like in your Fringe chair, welcome. Welcome to the jungle.  [Read more...]

Table 8 is the place no one would want to sit in the fictional restaurant dramatized in Haley Brown’s play at the Redrum theater at Fort Fringe. [Read more...]

Those unfamiliar with the premise of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience can imagine a smaller scale “High School Musical” production that takes place in England during the Victorian age. Complete with a fickle gang of boy-crazy mean girls, young love, love triangles and comically impressive young men in uniform who spend all their time strutting to impress their wayward girlfriends, it would remind anyone of their own melodramatic high school. [Read more...]

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”.

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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...]