FringeNYC 2004 Reviews - Page 10

M'Oro Flamenco
reviewed by Saviana Stanescu

I was very surprised and impressed by M'Oro Flamenco, a company of four dancers (Jenny Bascos, Gregory De Silva, Leslie Roybal, Ricky Santiago) and four musicians/singers (Peter Basil, Sean Kupisz, Jeremiah Lockwood, Cristian Puig) who have created one of the most exciting pieces of dance-performance that I have seen in years. The approach to an apparently fixed dance form such as flamenco is quite imaginative, well-crafted, and refreshing.

The choreographers Jenny Bascos and Gregory De Silva use flamenco’s layered percussive rhythms to articulate a new movement vocabulary that playfully and powerfully combines traditional flamenco with Indian classical and popular dance, Filipino martial arts, Afro-Latino percussion, jazz dance, and hip-hop. The result is a rebellious body language, superbly controlled and articulated by the performers. It’s like New York City poured its eclectic night sounds and movements into this ensemble, bringing the im/pulse of the street onto the small stage of the Players Theater on MacDougal.

M’oro means both “Moor” and outcast and yet contains within it a reference to “oro,” gold, suggesting the company’s aspiration to challenge the traditional rules of the dance as well as a journey into the discovery of new valuable aesthetic forms. A challenge for the sake of provocation of the past wouldn’t mean much. But M’oro Flamenco succeeds in pushing the boundaries of tradition through a very well-executed performance in which the flamenco theme seems to organically accept all the other influences, even the classical American tap dance.

The movement melts the various cultural roots into a fluid of body expressivity which sweeps you inside its own world, taking you on a fascinating roller-coaster ride. A ride not to be missed!

Irish Authors Held Hostage
reviewed by Josephine Cashman

Tucked away at the Greenwich Street Theater is the winning Irish Authors Held Hostage. Wittily written by John Morogiello and directed by Martin Blanco, the show presents a series of “variations” where famous Irish authors are being held captive by an equally varied bunch of International Terrorists. The cast of four plays many different characters full of life, with richly varied and well-executed dialects and a terrific sense of the absurd. The vaudeville-inspired scenes, complete with cards announcing which Irish Author has been abducted, deliver a charming, educational, and comical show. A working knowledge of Irish Literature is helpful when seeing the play, but it is by no means necessary.

Terence Heffernan does a standout job playing his many terrorists, from a North Korean to a Basque separatist to a Colombian terrorist straight from a re-run of Miami Vice. “All these accents confuse me,” one of Heffernan’s radicals confesses when he realizes that Emily Bronte, his latest hostage, is not, in fact, Irish. His most hilarious turn is the Middle Eastern terrorist who is seduced by his hostage, the flamboyant Oscar Wilde.

Kevin Carolyn also plays terrorists and Irish authors. His Sean O’Casey is outstanding, and his redneck terrorist who has kidnapped James Joyce is quite good as he finds himself bonding with the author of Finnegan’s Wake, realizing that they both share a love of alcohol and come from countries “founded on God and guns.”

John Morogiello is great as he plays his way through a multitude of Irish Authors: First there is Yeats, whom no one wants to kidnap (much to his dismay), then Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and J.M. Synge, but it is his Bernard Shaw that brings down the house as he theatrically critiques his own capture and consequential interrogation.

Last but certainly not least is Lori Boyd who is comical and charming. Her turn as the lusty Emily Bronte is quite funny and her old and batty Lady Gregory is marvelous.

The “variations” are broken up by live musicians playing Irish music and while it was gorgeous to hear, it sometimes went on a bit too long and broke up the flow of the scenes.

The reason for taking the Irish Authors hostage is never made clear, and the play lacks the strong ending it deserves, but nonetheless, Irish Authors Held Hostage is a delicious romp of a play. Grab a Guinness and check it out!

Queer Theory
reviewed by Jonathan Warman

You don’t have to be well acquainted with queer theory—an adventurous, dizzying field of study carved out on the cutting edges of gay and lesbian studies, gender studies and philosophy—to enjoy John Fisher’s playful farce Queer Theory. But, to quote the classic SNL fake ad for Jewess Jeans (starring Gilda Radner), “it wouldn’t hoit.”

The wacky premise: Dr. Jeff Webster (Matt Weimer), a queer theory specialist at the University of California at Berkeley, has this little theory about why, in Shakespeare’s time, female roles were played by boys. The fear, Webster asserts, was that the heat of performance would cause women’s vaginas to suddenly invert into penises, turning them into men (a superstition that queer theorists really did unearth). Well, suddenly Webster finds his own genitalia doing flip-flops on a regular basis, wreaking havoc on his plans to make the jump from UCB to Harvard. Plus, Webster seems to hate transgendered people, an unusual quality in the scrupulously inclusive world of queer theory. Gender and identity confusion have been standbys of comedy for thousands of years, and the situations caused by Webster’s instability are firmly in that classic comedy tradition. In other words, they’re reliably funny.

There are plenty of in-jokes that take me back to my days as a graduate student in NYU’s Performance Studies department; for me they are funny, but I’m not sure how broad their appeal is. Most of the humor is pretty accessible until the very end when the slippage of identity goes so far that it ceases to be funny (or particularly insightful). The best of the strong cast is Matthew Martin as Webster’s transgendered sister Renee (ah, that’s where his damage comes from!)—Martin performs with a brashness and showbiz savvy that plays like a cross between Kate Bornstein and Liza Minnelli. Le theory hot!

Happy Mundanes
reviewed by Riley MacLeod

Making assumptions based on the show’s tag line (“Alarm. Wash. Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.”) I expected Happy Mundanes to be dark. How could a show about the deadly routines of urban living not be full of despair and tortured contact improv? I settled into my seat ready to be shown a reason why it’s good to be unemployed.

Much to my surprise, my expectations were met with a show of a very different sort. The show’s actors-slash-creators, Justin Tyler and Aaron Wilton, present fifty minutes of classic physical comedy as they careen through waking, washing, working, and eating. Their entire performance is silent, beautifully complemented by original music by Adam Robb, who integrates his laid-back guitar seamlessly into the actors’ performances. The sparse set and lighting design, overseen by stage manager Aurelia Fisher, provide the bare bones this show needs to truly bring out the skills of its performers.

Tyler and Wilton have an excellent, unstated chemistry between them. They communicate superbly with small facial expressions and gestures. In one scene, their contact causes a light bulb to work, and their communication and performance style works in much the same way. Their touch is electric, both together and with the audience. They draw you into their world—sort of like your world, if it was ghost-written by the Marx Brothers—and their exploration spreads out into all the mundane facets of human existence. I mean, who hasn’t suspected their boss was a robot or had their mashed potatoes shriek at them? Tyler and Wilton make the unbelievable expected and turn the usual on its head.

Happy Mundanes never comes to any conclusions about how to make your work day less boring or “sums it all up.” In a loop of scenes of the characters rising, the show presents its share of the doldrums and uneasiness of doing the same thing time and again. But by looking at day-to-day living in a new way, this show presents the possibilities for change, excitement, and humor with vitality and a degree of optimism. At the very least, if I ever sit at a desk again, this show will give me something to chuckle about as I do.

The Tragedy of Othello
reviewed by David DelGrosso

The complete title of this show is The Tragedy (spelled with an IE on the end) of Othello, the Moor of Venice; attributed to William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon; A summary on cassette tape; A students' guide. The Hypocrites, a Chicago avant-garde company, has brought to New York this very portable and ambitious presentation: they will tell the story of Shakespeare’s Othello in 45 minutes with one actor, three playback machines and nine dolls, with the action played out on a card table covered with Astroturf.

A key element of the piece is at the end of its long title—“a students’ guide”—and indeed it feels like we are seeing a well-intentioned though ill-conceived school tour—perhaps the cottage industry of a man who goes from classroom to classroom with this tragedy truncated to fit between school bells. The FringeNYC venue is the Spotlight Lounge at Pace University, a no-frills, multipurpose space that helps add an education feel. Actor and "one-man-band" Kurt Ehrmann works tirelessly to bring us the story of Othello and watches us closely—almost desperate to see that we are getting it. He plays a tape which sounds like an academic relic—a students’ guide to Othello that summarizes the play act by act. Set to this narration, the man puts the dolls to work: 7 identical, little plastic blonde kewpie dolls for the supporting roles, a naked blonde Barbie for Desdemona, and—if I tell you what doll plays Othello, it would be to ruin a great laugh; let’s just say that he’s a black 80s pop icon, and bobble-headed. As the voice on the tape narrates, Ehrmann races to keep up—playing out scenes with the dolls, and sometimes portraying the villain Iago opposite them. Another tape player has an actor speaking Othello’s part, and the third device has Desdemona’s song.

To describe much more would be to give away surprises you should enjoy for yourself. The performance is audacious and hilarious. The sheer problem-solving that the man employs in his task and his need to communicate are both compelling, and elevate the piece above mere silliness or gimmickry. I happen to know Othello very well (and have experienced what it’s like to try to do it for a school in 45 minutes), but I think someone who is not familiar with the play would not only enjoy this performance, but also find at the end that they now know the story. It is an impressive party trick. I hope that The Hypocrites make regular visits to FringeNYC, and that this show gets larger crowds than the one I was with. It will help bolster the “Sing Along With Desdemona” portion of the evening. Lyrics are provided. Come add your voice to the recorded Desdemona of this production, Juice Newton.

Riding the Wave.com
reviewed by Kwesi Cameron

The promo for Riding the Wave.com, featuring smiling a Buddha checking his stock quotes by cell phone, is the perfect metaphor for the craziness that inhabits this one-man show.

Written and performed by Jonathan Mirin, this personal journey through the dot.com world begins in 1999, with stops along the way in Switzerland and India and back to the USA. Mirin explains how the pick-pocketing and shoplifting habits he developed during his upper middle-class childhood led to his love for the stock market. He got a thrill from getting something for nothing. Later he becomes an actor and teaches in a public school to pay the rent. Another teacher, a failed broker from the ‘80s market crash, turns Mirin on to investing in the tech company Wave Systems, and he is hooked. A Boston Globe article about Wave Systems (included in the show’s press kit) compares it to “the kid voted ‘most likely to succeed’ in high school, who is still living in his parents’ basement 16 years later.” To its investors, called Wavoids, prosperity is always just around the corner. Having no money, Mirin uses several credit cards to invest.

His addiction leads him to anxiously call for quotes several times a day. Whether the stock goes up or crashes down, Mirin never sells, always waiting for the proverbial next big hit. He falls in love with the idea of being “rich” on paper. When the stock reaches its highest point, Mirin owes more than he is worth in credit card bills. Through his personal problems and tragedies, Mirin holds on to Wave like a lifeline.

When not checking quotes, he meditates. Visiting Europe on the cheap with borrowed money and credit cards, he decides to make a pilgrimage to India, both seeking spiritual enlightenment and avoiding his problems.

There are very funny moments in Riding the Wave.com. Mirin is a performer with energy to burn. Jason Grossman, the director, has done a good job of staging with limited props and keeping the action moving. The play occasionally gets bogged down in technical jargon; my head was spinning with stock prices at one point. It also has the tendency of sounding like one long monologue. Riding the Wave.com is at its best when its protagonist is interacting with the various characters he encounters over the years.

Does he sell? After finding someone to share his life, he becomes a “take carer” rather than a taker.

The Precinct
reviewed by Don Jordan

Currently running at the Greenwich Street Theatre is The Precinct, the latest concoction by the well-known sketch comedy group, Elephant Larry. Comprised of about a dozen short sequences, The Precinct makes clever use of the mystique of police life á la the film and television entertainments that the general public has historically swallowed as reality.

The success of Elephant Larry’s work clearly resides in their strong and detailed characterizations, wherein each member of the team (a quintet that includes Alexander Zalben, Geoff Haggerty, Chris Principe, Jeff Solomon, and Stefan Lawrence) is able to maintain a slew of vivid personae which do not dissolve as the tension mounts and comic chaos erupts.

Highlights of the evening include an á capella version of New York’s infamous bagpipes by Haggerty and Lawrence, as well as a bit in which criminals are brought back to life by being shot in their genitalia. Haggerty’s portrayal of a deadpan detective suddenly overcome with fear and trembling over the photos of a crime scene is a spot-on homage to noir films of the 40’s and 50’s.

The Precinct only falters when it slows down to bring a story-line into play. Fabricated around a search for the “3am Killer,” these expository scenes are not nearly as developed as the others, and they seem to lack the confidence and audience awareness that make a sketch routine click. While adding a strong narrative to make a more cohesive evening is not necessarily successful in this instance, it is exciting to see the group experiment with form in their endeavor to expand the genre.

Overall, The Precinct is best when Elephant Larry draws upon its past experience and focuses on the sketch routines that the audience expects and is there to see. This is a fun time, one that the audiences should enjoy, and a performance ideally suited to FringeNYC.

Laughing All the Way from the Sperm Bank
reviewed by Alexander Zalben

A one-woman show written and performed by a teenager that would actually be a great showcase for a mid-thirties lesbian actress in a career slump? Oh, you wacky Fringe Festival!

Emma Tattenbaum-Fine is the teenaged writer-performer in question, and despite the fact that the material and performer are curiously mismatched, Tattenbaum-Fine is a talented writer with excellent comic timing, making this short, funny show well worth watching.

Laughing All the Way from the Sperm Bank takes off from a conversation between a lesbian couple looking to get impregnated. While the couple deliberates about what type of sperm to choose, they dream of what their daughter might turn out to be like. This gives Tattenbaum-Fine the opportunity to follow the time-honored one-woman show tradition of portraying all the nutty characters she can do.

But although the characters are very well-formed and well-written, the performance is another story. Tattenbaum-Fine has a high, squeaky cartoonish voice that should make her very successful in voiceovers or sitcoms, but it doesn’t allow her to effectively differentiate between her characters. Additionally, it’s never clear why a teenager is writing and performing a show about two lesbians at a sperm bank. Is the implication that these are her parents? Her intentions are never made clear and so we lose the two cornerstones of one-person shows: personal confessions and distinct characterizations.

Thus I am led to the conclusion that this would be a great showcase for someone other than the author herself. However, Tattenbaum-Fine does have excellent comic timing and even some of the sillier or punnier jokes in the show are sold by her excellent delivery, but more to the credit of her crisp, clear writing. So while she may not be a good character comic, this show makes very clear that she is a good writer, and knows how to deliver her jokes.

Her bio states that she’ll be performing in open mics around town, which is great news. A stand-up who has good writing and timing behind her is always in short supply. As for this show itself? Catch it if you want to see a new comic voice. Otherwise, wait until next year’s Fringe, when it’s sure to be performed by an aging drag queen backed up by a chorus of go-go boys dressed in Bush masks. Or something like that.

Ellen Craft, a new opera
reviewed by Maggie Bell

The basis for Ellen Craft, a new opera, is the fascinating true story of a fair-skinned slave woman who escaped to freedom by disguising herself as a white man in 19th century America. Sherry Boone, librettist and director of this work, spent nearly a decade researching slave stories, along with composer Sean Jeremy Palmer. Boone clearly shows her passion for this topic in her poignant depiction of Ellen’s struggle for liberty, as does Palmer in his musical composition.

Cruelty is a major theme of this opera. Through Ellen’s torture and torment, one is supposed to feel the same desperation that Ellen herself feels. Her situation is both tragic and beyond her control: she is the offspring of a white slave-owner and a black slave woman, and her light skin makes her an ambiguous figure in the harsh world of her Alabama plantation.

At the outset, Ellen’s father gives his daughter away as a birthday present to a new mistress. William Craft’s statement, “You’re going to love her” turns out to be a piece of bitter irony: she is stifled by her mistress and grows to hate her surroundings. Full of the desire to do what her mother could not, and aided by her light skin, she escapes the plantation by dressing as a white man and traveling to Pennsylvania, a free state. In a move of dazzling ingenuity, Ellen brings along her lover, Holden, claiming him as her property. Having never had her own clear identity, Ellen is a natural role-player and her bluff is convincing.

Powerful as this material is, Sherry Boone’s production has a preachy feel to it. The opera's focus on oppression and its effects offer nothing new; instead, I wanted more details about Ellen’s journey. This was a miracle for its time, and it made me want to get to know this powerful woman and her brave lover.

The staging of this opera is somewhat stilted, with all of the performers onstage at all times, watching the action. However, the music is powerful, changing with the beat of the story. It is also inventive, using sounds not normally found in classical opera, from drums to a Gospel beat. All of the cast members are fully engaged in their performances. Terrence Archie plays Ellen's father William with panache, and Donna Lynne Champlin strongly conveys the sharpness of Ellen's mistress. Linda Dorsey and Hall Beasley are full of heart in their portrayals of Ellen and Holden. You never stop believing that they are on a mission to survive. Linda Dorsey’s sings with all her might, coloring her words with every fiber of her emotions. Pretending to be a white man, she transforms into the conservative stereotype that she was exposed to all of her life.

Although not ultimately thought-provoking, Ellen Craft reveals the true miracles that can happen when people abandon fear and do what they need to improve their life.

Holiday in the Sun
reviewed by David DelGrosso

With so many choices of shows splitting the audiences at FringeNYC, a house of fewer than ten people is not an uncommon sight. However I imagine it takes real professional discipline to give your all to eight people when you have come halfway across the world to perform. The three driven and confident actors from Sydney, Australia were undaunted by this, and from the opening of Sean O’riordan’s Holiday in the Sun, the vocal energy was so strong and the speaking crisp and clear that I was able to relax, knowing we were in good hands.

O’riordan’s play concerns two estranged school friends, Bretta (Deborah Ann Hanley) and Holly (Lisa Scope), who meet by chance and decide to reconnect by spending a holiday in a seaside cabin. The young women shared many things in their youth—a passion for protesting in the streets, innocently calling for “The Revolution” with a capital "R"; a shopping adventure in New York City—but are now grown up and have disparate careers: Holly teaches school, Bretta has joined the police force. Together again in this secluded cabin, Holly seems at ease, while Bretta, haunted by a secret, keeps predicting that a storm is coming, and is unnaturally drawn towards the steep cliffs.

The play is fluid in time and place. A series of non-linear flashbacks, separated by bursts of music to keep the energy up, shows us this friendship over the course of many years. The scenes play out as Holly and Bretta remember them in their present state; that is to say, each flashback is colored either by Holly’s vibrancy or Bretta’s foreboding. Playwright O’riordan and director Sandra Lee Paterson have an excellent command of menace—throughout the play we feel Bretta’s approaching storm, as if a portentous cloud is passing over these memories and heading for the small cabin.

This menace is established most effectively by the use of the third character, simply called the Girl (Suzanne Mackay). At first it seems that the third actor will simply be playing all of the roles that are not Holly or Bretta—a frequent enough convention in a small-cast play. But soon it becomes clear that the Girl is a presence haunting their memories, appearing in their shared past, sometimes in unexpected places and always as this same Girl. The device helps to maintain the ghost-story tone, and also fits well with the play’s themes of memory and the unreliable ways we look back on the past.

This theatre company, Rhose Entertainment, is also presenting Sorry...(i love you) at FringeNYC, with the same three performers.

The Book of Ruth
reviewed by Jocelyn Szabo

A Yankees fan forever, I was thrilled to be seeing a play about the legendary Babe Ruth. I could not wait to taunt my cousins (diehard Red Sox fans) with my new knowledge of the Babe. Unfortunately, The Book of Ruth proved to be a disappointment.

I applaud the efforts of writers Doug Byer and Robert Philp. The idea behind the piece is wonderful —who doesn’t want to hear the story behind a legend like Babe Ruth? The script reveals him to be an alcoholic and a womanizer. Of course, no man is without his faults, legend or not. But to bring to light certain truths without adding a sense of humanity makes me dislike both the writers and the legend—the writers for destroying a baseball legend and the Babe for being less of a man than I had hoped for all these years.

Don Schmidt makes an admirable attempt at capturing the charisma of the Babe, but he has trouble with his lines, and in fact, so much trouble that it became a distraction. One-man shows are extremely difficult and so I give Schmidt credit for his effort, nevertheless.

Ultimately, the writing does make a statement, and although the Babe that I came to know here was not someone I liked, maybe that’s what Byer and Philp were going for all along.

The Psychic Hour
reviewed by Stephen Graybill

Last night I saw my first FringeNYC show for this year. And what a show it was. The Psychic Hour, by Susan Murray (book and lyrics) and Marty Fernandi (book and music), directed by Scott Collishaw, is a musical about a psychic and a skeptic, and how their lives intermingle over the course of a year. Myrna, a has-been psychic who is convinced her "powers" are on hiatus, is on the verge of her first break into network television with her own show, “The Psychic Hour.” Kevin, a complete skeptic, happens upon her show, when he steps into the wrong theatre and they end up falling in love over coffee. It turns out that Kevin is the true psychic of the pair and ends up with all the attention, in more ways than one.

This show has a unique idea behind it. I have never seen a show follow two psychics around. Unfortunately, it was something short of a full treat for me. Given the difficulty of putting on a Fringe show, I’ll skip over the lack of aesthetic visual aid. However, the writing seems thrown together, lacking in motivation in numerous places, and at times it is wholly unbelievable. Similarly, the songs did not add much to the emotion of the characters or to the piece as a whole.

Writer Susan Murray’s uncharismatic portrayal of Myrna, left me uninterested in what was happening to her, or how ever much she might love Kevin. (If it was not in the writing already I never would have thought they were in love.) However, Trent Dawson, who plays Kevin, has a wonderful voice and a great stage presence; to me, he and Emily Lester (who plays Tina, the NBC Producer, bringing a lot of much needed energy to each scene she is in) are the real treats to watch.

The rest of the cast fils in nicely with the various characters they're given to play; especially Scott Rayow and Meg Donaldson, who perform their roles with diversity, energy, and intention.

If it weren’t for the unmotivated characters, lazy blocking, and poor writing all around this comedy might have landed better with me as an audience member. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy this show as much as many other people seem to have. Check it out if you want…tickets are going fast, if they haven’t gone already.