CurtainUp
The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features,
Annotated Listings
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CurtainUp The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features,
Annotated Listings |
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A CurtainUp Report
2018 New York International Fringe Festival
October 26 Update CurtainUp began covering the New York Fringe Festival twenty years ago. Over that span, the nature of the festival evolved in many ways. In 2017, the festival took a hiatus, to examine itself and make significant changes. Most obvious, perhaps, is the shift from August to October. What has emerged is also significantly smaller and more compact. For the first time, however, in addition to the traditional festival in downtown Manhattan (which runs October 12-28 and is still called FringeNYC), there is an outer borough component (called FringeBYOV and running the entire month). The part of the festival focusing on young audiences, FringeJR, gets a head start: it commences performances October 5. For FringeNYC shows, there is a single location at which the audience congregates, called FringeHUB. It is located at 685 Washington Street, at Charles Street. (Reviews of shows at other venues will include the location in the review.) Further information, schedules, and ticketing are available at
www.fringenyc.org.
In keeping with the reduced scale, CurtainUp's coverage will also be smaller than it has been in the past. As shows are reviewed, they will be posted chronologically below. An alphabetical list of reviews can be found in the column to the right. The reviewer will be identified at the end of each capsule review. Reviews
OPIE  Chicago-based Improv/Sketch Comedy team members Olivia Nielson and Patriac Coakley perform multiple comic/ironic scenarios. Ably directed by Megan Johns, these amusing and disciplined actors are are not exactly doing improv, but performing pieces that have been developed through improvisation and then frozen for performance. Snippets of recorded songs introduce these absurd situation comedy fragments laced with peculiar dances, movement, and tiny telling details. Among the bits are scenes of couples coming out of marriage therapy, a CPR course, a memorial service, a mom and kid, a game show from hell, and much more. Intimate disclosures are tossed off in the duo's polished scenarios, and little niggling problems hint at big issues. Sometimes the rough, unsettling humor, which can be a bit disturbing, has us guiltily laughing at sad things. With this year's tidbits as a taster it would be interesting to see some longer pieces developed out of Chicago for next year's fringe. 1 hour. [Kathryn Osenlund] Salome  Is there any precise point that an author should say "Stop!" as he creates his work? If you're Oscar Wilde and writing the play Salome, the answer is an emphatic "No!" Banned in London in 1892, Salome has been stirring up controversy and misunderstanding for 126 years. Now the rarely-staged play arrives at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn, under the aegis of M-34 Productions and directed by James Rutherford. It features a large cast led by Laura Butler Rivera in the nominal role with transgender actress Feathers Wise playing the prophet Iokanaan. In Salome, you might recall, the title character lusts after the prophet Iokanaan (think John the Baptist), who spurns the Lolita in royal robes. The outraged minx soon finds a chance to take revenge on the chaste prophet when her stepfather Herod (Marty Keiser) asks her to dance as he gazes on her. The old lecher's bait? He promises to give her anything she desires. Things go horrifically haywire for Herod, however, when the Princess agrees to dance -- but only on the condition that the head of Iokanaan be brought to her on a dish. Yes, Rutherford's new take on the tragedy retains all the grisly aspects of Wilde's play. But he re-imagines it at a slightly different level of vibration. Not only does he give us a new translation of Wilde's original French text, but he non-conventionally casts Feathers Wise as the prophet, giving the role a genderfluid feel. The creative use of the capacious performing space at the Irondale Center ensures that the 22-member cast are kept on their theatrical toes throughout, with the balcony areas becoming like an eagle's eyrie for characters to execute their wiles. Be prepared for nudity in Salome's Dance of the Seven Veils. Nudity is almost de rigueur for any production of the play, and this one is no exception. It was staged successfully on Broadway with Al Pacino (Herod) and Marisa Tomei (Salome) in 2003. Although the current production might not have any big names in the cast, it does invite us to see the biblical personages again, complete with all their lechery, pride, and OCD personality disorders. 95 minutes. At The Irondale Center, 85 South Oxford Street, Brooklyn. [Deirdre Donovan] Starcrossed "'Tis fractured history we plan to mend." Rachel Garnet's clever, clever writing twists around Shakespeare's immortal words to produce a hidden back story to the Capulet-Montague feud. It's a bold writer who will take on the task of matching new comedy to Shakespeare, and it's a writer with a really good ear who succeeds. Ms Garnet's repurposed words and phrases fit new situations behind the scenes of Shakespeare's enduring Romeo and Juliet and explore the connection of secondary characters, bold Tybalt (Eric Bermudez) and nimble Mercutio (Connor Delves). Tybalt, a slave to duty and reputation, finds Mercutio positively alluring. And vice versa. Who knew they were gentle swains? Versatile Byron Hagan handles roles of Capulet, Romeo, Paris, Benvolio, Juliet, and a servant. This show has everything including smart alecky talk about romance: Paris: "I do not take seconds."The performance moves along at a clip with tightly choreographed exits and entrances under the direction of David Kahawaii IV. Lively and engrossing, Starcrossed brings out the gay blades, later accidentally deadly blades, ending the revels as "A pair of starcrossed lovers lose their life." 1 hour. [Kathryn Osenlund] The Beautiful  Playwright Jonathan Ward has based his play on Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Beautiful, which was set in the 1820s/30s and published in 1844. Hawthorne's story delves deeply into issues of practicality vs beauty. Following the original story, Ward's slow and delicate Fringe play at first explores love, spiritualized machinery, and The Beautiful. Owen (Chris Tipp), a young clockmaker, is in love with the boss's recently married daughter, Annie (Jennifer Laine Williams). Her husband, a solid and ordinary blacksmith, was selected by her pragmatic father. Owen presents Annie with a delicate mechanical butterfly that he made as a gift for her wedding. A dreamer and an artist, Owen is completely engaged in designing his spiritualized fragile machinery. Ultimately, though, he loves making beautiful things even more than he loves Annie. His position becomes clear when he reads his "Work of Fiction" to her. Purportedly their story, it's really all about him. His narrative, his triumphs. Directed by Emily Tetzlaff, the actors do a good job, and it's not easy. The playwright diverges, extrapolating the story out to a different sensibility, blending two strands -- the spirit of the beautiful object and the introduction of a tract on Feminism. The original Hawthorne story does not consider questions of early 19th Century radical women's empowerment. But here Annie admires the work of Ur Feminist Margaret Fuller (a pre-women's movement advocate who published in 1845, after the timeframe of the Hawthorne tale). In a rather unlikely shift for her era, Annie, the girl who married a rugged blacksmith at her pragmatist father's decree, becomes self-actualized and expects to support herself in Paris by writing her thin, uninspired poetry. Is it the playwright's intention to highlight her brave quest for freedom, or to illustrate the hopelessness of her situation? 55 minutes. [Kathryn Osenlund] Hillary Clinton's Song Cycle: Witness  Out of the disbelief and emptiness following Hillary Clinton's 2016 election loss, this little concert emerged. The duo is singer-songwriter Rebecca Pronsky (of the original concept album) and jazz pianist and vocalist Deidre Rodman Struck (who is, BTW, a member of the Lascivious Biddies.) It sounds pretty bad to say that this show is full of downer songs, but basically it is. Don't let that dissuade you from going. Hillary's laments, sung using her own published words, express her reactions to the loss of the election, the loss of her mother, and the loss of her fighting spirit that had never flagged before. Rebecca and Deidre sing Hillary's insights as she works through what she lost, and as she fashions her own recovery. It's somber, but not all dirge. Rife with disappointment, the song cycle struggles along with Hillary and eventually gets satisfyingly outrageous with comic Russian trolls and sparkly feather-boa'd creatures. The singing is certainly heartfelt and Ms Struck's Yamaha keyboard rocks. The show ends bold, with special wishes for the current president, for which everyone in the room seemed to be on board. 55 minutes. [Kathryn Osenlund] (Mary) (Mary) opens with classmates, Gus and Ritter, getting acquainted. [The actors names are not listed in the Fringe Festival Program.] These kids are high school juniors and the Prom is coming up. Gus is not a cool guy. Kind of shy, he takes pictures. According to Ritter he's "very forgettable." She asks him to talk like a regular person. Cranky, she calls just about everything "stupid." They develop a kind of grudging friendship as they circle around various subjects, edging toward communication and truths. When she asks him what she looks like, he responds, "Like the sun, but small and mean." There are many clever moments in playwright Steve Silvestri's dialogue. Over time the two teenagers progress from not caring to crossed signals. One of them moves forward and the other stays the same. There's just one thing this production needs, and that is meaningful stage activity. Without it, this could be a radio show. 80 minutes. [Kathryn Osenlund] Do This One Thing for Me  Jane Elias's Do This One Thing for Me, a memory play for a single actor, chronicles the uneasy yet loving relationship of a young adult woman and her father. Beni Elias, the parent, is a Greek-born Sephardic Jew who, as an adolescent, survived Bergen-Belsen and, as an adult, found success in the USA. Jane — Beni's daughter and the play's autobiographical protagonist — is a fledgling writer whose poems are beginning to be published. Beni fervently wants what's best for Jane, but the two disagree vigorously as to what that "best" would be. He visualizes her married (preferably to a very good provider) with children; she's focused on professional accomplishment. Beni fears that "one day maybe you're gonna wake up and it's gonna be too late." It's "no good," he warns, "to be alone." In the course of this performance, father and daughter — both portrayed by the playwright — confront each other again and again in scenes (some predictable, some funny, all touching) that permit Elias to demonstrate admirable capacity for quicksilver shifts from one character to another. Two-thirds of the way through the play, Jane (against her father's wishes) embarks on her own on a package tour of Eastern Europe designed for descendants of Jews who suffered the Holocaust at first hand. This sequence contains the production's most moving moment, when Jane reads the names of lost relatives aloud in a gas chamber of the Auschwitz concentration camp while her fellow tour members listen, preparing to say the traditional mourners' prayer or Kaddish in honor of her forebears. Most of Do This One Thing for Me concerns the long, slow reconciliation of child and parent; the Holocaust tour is an interpolation in which the protagonist grapples with her place and that of her family in the brutal history of the 20th century. It's a dramatic interruption — a "play within the play" — rather than an integral part of the whole. Engaging as it is (and, in fact, because it's so engaging), Jane's European odyssey undercuts the power of the play's final scenes in which she comes to terms with being Beni's daughter. 70 minutes. [Charles Wright] Serving Brulee  Sone Anandpara's Serving Brulee is a parody of a televised daytime cooking show in New York City. It purports to dramatize the vacuousness of such TV programs. If that were all there was to it, it would be a mere trifle of a theater piece. But, fortunately, it has more meat to it-and is entertaining to boot. What turns the play from being silly to serious happens midway through the presentation. The TV show host Lila Das (Sone Anandpara) has meticulously executed, with the assistance of a guest graduate student Michelle Stiles (Ivy Hong), all the steps necessary to create a satisfying crème brûlée. Just as Lila is preparing to bake the culinary confection in the oven, however, she accidentally drops it on the studio floor. It immediately arrests the psychobabble that she has been spewing to her TV viewers, along with the remaining agenda of the cooking show. Although TV crew member (Emma Cavalier) rushes to the periphery of the set to urge Lila to rise to the occasion, Lila can't cope with the culinary disaster and has an anxiety attack on air. Without being a spoiler, what follows the brouhaha is an epiphany for Lila and Michelle, and it gives us a taste of the women's movement in miniature. Directed by Chelsea B. Lockie, and written by Anandpara, Serving Brulee, though promising, seems more of a work-in-progress than a finished production. Sightlines were hopeless for any audience member sitting at the back of the venue (I had to crane my neck to see the performing area), and the dialogue was difficult to hear at times. But, that said, the play's message is as vital as the blow torch used to caramelize the sugar on creme crème brûlée. 45 minutes. [Deirdre Donovan] Allah Earth: The Cycle of Life  And off we set from Fringe 2018 headquarters tent [FringeHUB] to the mystery venue for Allah Earth. Our ten-minute walk on West Village narrow sidewalks ended at a Recital Hall. The setting couldn't have been better chosen for the intimate audience. The deep wood, acoustically ideal room with a window onto the garden below underlined Sabina England's homage to the rhythms and endless variety of nature, the divinely created work that transcends any particular religious path. England selected a deep green Indian costume and flowing headscarf with extensive gold trim to underline the nature theme. She is in constant movement at times to comment via dance the projected images on the large screen as her backdrop. She weaves butterflies, the energy of crashing waves, and swaying branches into her tapestry of life. To her visuals are added Paco Seren's meditative score as rendered by Micropixie as instrumentalist and sound designer. Projected and spoken text (Loren D.) appear only at the very end after we've fully absorbed England's pantheistic philosophy. A sign language interpreter was on hand to translate, but England as a deaf artist herself effectively communicated the essence of her message wordlessly. 45 minutes. [David Lipfert] |
Search CurtainUp in the box below REVIEWS Allah Earth: The Cycle of Life The Beautiful Do This One Thing for Me Hillary Clinton's Song Cycle: Witness (Mary) OPIE Salome Serving Brulee Starcrossed For a feed to reviews and features as they are posted at http://curtainupnewlinks.blogspot.com to your reader Curtainup at Facebook . . . Curtainup at Twitter To subscribe to our FREE email updates: E-mail: esommer@curtainup.com put SUBSCRIBE CURTAINUP EMAIL UPDATE in the subject line and your full name and email address in the body of the message. If you can spare a minute, tell us how you came to CurtainUp and from what part of the country. |