The Shakespeare Show: Or, how an illiterate son of a glover became the Greatest Playwright in the World
Written by Ryan Gladstone
Directed by Karen Hamm
Featuring Tara Travis and Ryan Gladstone
ribbitREpublic
Orange Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

Did he? Or didn’t he? That is the question. Did the bard of Avon pen his theatrics, or, taking the work of others, claim for himself that which he did not doeth? More ink is spilled on this debate than on Jack the Ripper or the Bavarian Illuminati or the Brangelina break up. And while that ink is probably drilling a hole in the ozone somewhere, it gives ribbitREpublic productions an excuse to speak in iambic pentameter and wave imaginary swords and act in a genuinely Elizabethan silliness. In this imaginary world, Mr. Shakespeare (Gladstone) is an Elizabethan parking attendant, holding the steeds of the well to do as they attend the theatre. The foppish Earl of Oxford (Tara Travis) has time on his hands and poetry in his heart, but society frown on theatre so he needs a dupe to present his plays. He leaves a script in the stable, and simple William decides his favorite horse Chester is the author. The resulting tale is thumb-bitingly funny, with swords fights and lesbian sex and plagues. These guys were left out of this year’s error ridden program, but their on-line show times are correct. Get thee to this show, groundlings!

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Moogda – A Love Story
By Mark J Richman
Patrons Room, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

This is a real heart breaker. Mark Richman works the Ren Faire circuit, chases women, and considers himself a very specific type of jerk until he meets the girls of his dream. His pet name for her is “Moogda”, and they fall in love, move in together, and wind up in Florida working the parks and dinner theatres. Money’s tight but romance and sex cover for that. Suddenly, a serious health problem strikes her down at 28. He’s devastated, we’re devastated, and the show ends. We hang around and talk about it for a while, and then the venue tech kicks us out for the next show.

Richman’s story is immediate and personal, and the death is so recent that his grieving is not over. We are pulled in, but his staccato story telling needs more drama and foreshadowing and a less anecdotal organization. We get the idea that Moogda was his soul mate and they were having a great marriage, but the death seems that and that alone – the end of something, and Richman unclear about his path forward. While this was certainly good therapy for him, and I’m completely sympathetic, there’s an element of emotional hijacking here. I still need a bit of that 4th wall to see this as a story and not a plea, and I’m not sure where to send the flowers.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

…Some Other Day
By Shave and Reilly
www.shaveandreilly.com
Pink Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

I think there’s a deep, deep meaning to this mime act, but a frenzied, fist pounding discussion in the beer tent left me just as confused. OK, we didn’t really pound our fists on those flimsy plastic tables, but there was a brief “WTF? / Beats me” on the walk over. Shave and Reilly call their stuff “Baggy Pants Comedy”, and it flows directly from the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. They ARE entertaining to watch, and their skilled acrobatics and floppy bodies do some amazing thing. The consensus opinion was the pair were acting out a series of deaths and rebirths, tied together by umbrellas and scarves. At first they are picking themselves up by the scruffs of the own necks, later they writhe around in what might be highly stylized sexual activity, and eventual they try, unsuccessfully to dismantle a bomb that look like it came from a 1970′s made for TV thriller. But I’m just pulling all that out the air, go check them out and let me know if you conclude differently. Take your kids; they’ll love it as much as you will.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Who Murdered Winthrop Carlson: A Choose Your Own (Mis) Adventure Mystery
By Davis Strauss
Directed by Chuck Dent
Playwright’s Round Table
Blue Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I belong to PRT, submitted a script for this project, and contributed some sound effects, but I’ve been asked to publish a few comments on “Winthrop Carlson anyway. So here we go: Hardboiled detective stories are a staple of short play festivals, they offer some easy tropes to write against, have an element of mystery and romance, and tough guy dialog is easy to write. This twist here? The audience gets to steer the course of the show, as in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series by Bantam Books.

Natty Winthrop Carlson (Eric Kuritzky) is a wealthy industrialist who fears for his life. He invites gumshoe Edward Reynolds (Steven Pugh) to dinner and to meet his family. He’s dead a few pages later with everyone else on stage a suspect. As Reynolds investigates, the audience is periodically asked to decide questions like “Should Reynolds question the maid or look for the murder weapon?” This element of improv makes the different each time, but suppresses any detective insight Reynolds may have, leaving the investigation seem flat.

So it’s not a very good mystery novel, but the acting makes up for that. Once you get past Reynolds Sam Spade dialog, Pugh is an oily and convincing private dick. Helga the maid (Megan Kachur) had a sexy Terri Garr quality, while Beverly Carson (Nikki Darden) was icy gorgeous as Winthrop’s Trophy wife. Sam Waters played the bumbling regular police detective Malone, his frothy anger bounced off Reynolds while Crayford Carlson (Eric Morris) flitted about like a nervous Woody Alan. There are laughs here and as a detective parodies go, this is certainly one of them. Come for the acting, not the drama.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Capt. Discovery and “Escape to Planet O”
By Jeff Ferree
Jamie Mykins Theater
Orlando, FL, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

This is downright silly. Next to the volunteer room, there’s this abandoned closet that once held a furnace or gas water heater, and now is an impromptu puppet theatre. It’s about 5 feet wide and 10 feet deep, and just large enough to hold nine agoraphobic arts lovers. Jeff Ferree and his daughter Sophie rigged an outer space puppet stage, and if you’re lucky enough to get in the line, or start the line, you might see this quirky little show. Admission is by donation, the money goes to fund a future puppet “Titus Andronicus.” I’m so already there.

At one end of the room is a small puppet stage with a black curtain. More black fabric punctuated by small incandescent Christmas lights covers the walls, and they really hurt when you lean into them. About 15 people arrive for the show, but Fringe code only allows two badge wielding people with unnaturally colored hair in the space. The solution was simple if not fair – whoever is first in line gets too decide who else is allowed in. A heated discussion arose, topics of “If we cooperate for the common good” clashed with “We’ve been waiting for over an hour” and “I’m so much smaller than any of you.” When the kerfuffle settled, nine of us crammed into the escape pod, including the two smallest people in the Orlando Arts scene: Adrienne Feldman and Brandon Roberts.

Oh, yeah, there’s a puppet show in this closet. Captain Discovery is a windbag astro jock, and he’s BS’ing Betty Jane who we all know should be in love with Billy Nerd. The Eyeball puppet narrates, and when the Mushroom People attack, Captain Discover pees his pants and claims the victory. The planet of She-Wolves whips out its tractor beam and drags them down to steal the guys’ precious bodily essences, and once again Billy Nerd saves the day. Will he ever get the nooky he deserves from Betty Jane? Probably not, it’s the destiny of the Guy in the Horn Rim Glasses to never get the girl.

After ten minutes, the story is done, the oxygen is consumed, and I no longer have to worry about accidently touching Brendon Roberts inappropriately. Too bad the cute girl in the glasses didn’t stick around to see the show. She was just over HERE.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Not that you’re going ot get in to see this. Just sayin’….

VarieTEASE – Deconstruction
Created by Blue
babyBLUESTAR Productions
Orange Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

The parade of small freaky child actors continues in this season’s VarieTEASE offering. Someone in the beer tent pointed out that every Fringe seems to have an unofficial theme – sometimes its excessive improv, or excessive male nudity, occasionally excessive Canadian monologists, but 2010 is the year of excessive underage female dancers. “Deconstruction” opens to a remixed “Live and Let Die” and a young, extremely flexible girl back flipping across the stage. Her mother enters with milk and cookies and as she leaves, the girl’s collection of stuffed animals comes to life and terrorizes the audience. Through some stage door magic, our youngster transforms into Blue who appear behind a silk scrim with her phantom lover. Ballet and expressive dance flow forward, but Blue and her lover can’t marry until mom gets around to dying. Along the way, Blue’s mixing skills give us music that sounds familiar yet can’t be placed. Rumors implicate The Tiger Lillies and Scissors Sisters, and I positively identified. “Good Morning, Good Morning” and “Getting High for Jesus” along with Depeche Mode and the gospel standards “You Can’t Hide.” A 6 foot joint appears and Chris MacIntyre passes it around the floor and into the audience, but there are no cookies for us. At the end, when mom dies we sort of feel sad, but then the wedding commences, and garters and bouquets hit the floor. While nothing will match the 2007 “Carnivale”, this show flows elegantly and mysteriously, and the young women float across the floor better than any of those in other shows.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Saucy Jack
By Doug McLauchlan
Tethersend Productions
Pink Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

The irony of mass murder lies in its asymmetric fame. Kill a hundred people, and no one remembers their names, but yours goes up in stars on Wikipedia. Doug McLauchlan is down from Canada with an ambitious and slightly disjoint history of Jack The Ripper and the morality of unplanned death. Posing as the scourge of Whitechapel, McLauchlan begins by polling the audience – is Jack evil or just misunderstood? Evil wins by a landslide, and he charges forward, building a case that Society Made Him Do It. By drawing in dubious connections to war and religion, the argument runs along the general lines of “if a million deaths are a statistic, why are five dead hookers a tragedy?” A supporting lemma is that the Jack the Ripper murders were highly symbolic and increasingly gruesome, and after creating enough public outrage, he stopped, but his actions set the stage for World War One and Hiroshima. As a metaphor, it might make sense, but as for a Victorian crime drama, it’s ludicrous.

McLauchlan’s delivery moves forward haltingly, but he does give enough facts about the case and the controversy to keep my interest. The descriptions of the slums and desperate prostitute driven to the streets by well intentioned moralist who closed the brothels is fascinating: we tend to marginalize the marginal. There was and still is a cliff in society – fall over the edge and you are very unlikely to ever get back up. There’s material for debate lurking here, but killing prostitutes just because you don’t like them doing the only thing they can to survive is still pretty evil. A closing poll on the “Jack The Ripper: evil or misunderstood” question showed one man had shifted his opinion.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

By Doug McLauchlan
Tethersend Productions
Pink Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

The irony of mass murder lies in its asymmetric fame. Kill a hundred people, and no one remembers their names, but yours goes up in stars on Wikipedia. Doug McLauchlan is down from Canada with an ambitious and slightly disjoint history of Jack The Ripper and the morality of unplanned death. Posing as the scourge of Whitechapel, McLauchlan begins by polling the audience – is Jack evil or just misunderstood? Evil wins by a landslide, and he charges forward, building a case that Society Made Him Do It. By drawing in dubious connections to war and religion, the argument runs along the general lines of “if a million deaths are a statistic, why are five dead hookers a tragedy?” A supporting lemma is that the Jack the Ripper murders were highly symbolic and increasingly gruesome, and after creating enough public outrage, he stopped, but his actions set the stage for World War One and Hiroshima. As a metaphor, it might make sense, but as for a Victorian crime drama, it’s ludicrous.

McLauchlan’s delivery moves forward haltingly, but he does give enough facts about the case and the controversy to keep my interest. The descriptions of the slums and desperate prostitute driven to the streets by well intentioned moralist who closed the brothels is fascinating: we tend to marginalize the marginal. There was and still is a cliff in society – fall over the edge and you are very unlikely to ever get back up. There’s material for debate lurking here, but killing prostitutes just because you don’t like them doing the only thing they can to survive is still pretty evil. A closing poll on the “Jack The Ripper: evil or misunderstood” question showed one man had shifted his opinion.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

A Brighter Shade of Blue
Paul Strickland
Brown Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

“Positive Thinking” and “Standup Comedy” aren’t two phrases that make an easy pairing, but Mr. Strickland generates roaring laughter as he details the agony of a messy divorce and his attempts to improve his attitude in the ashes. He brings a comedian’s mind to the problem: “The economy was so bad my marriage got downsized.” This loose cycle of monologues ranges from riotous to life affirming. His “A” material involves a nights spent in Bald Knob, Arkansas where he’s taught the intricacies of the term “DangDurn” and his wife’s serious question of what to do if a T-Rex appears in the middle of the highway. When his adopted philosophy of positivism becomes his topic, the laughs fade. Strickland is an ace standup guy, I hope he gets over the ex-wifey and gets back to Arkansas; it’s a funny place if you don’t have to live there.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Coping a Craigie
By R. T. Robeson
Directed by Laurel Clark
Freeline Productions
Red Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

In a world of mismatched roommates, Dana (Dave McConnell) and Eugene (Alan James Gallant) form a great comedy duo. Eugene is uptight, Jewish, intellectual and employed, while Dana is tattooed, broke, and eats potato chips with his mouth open. The rent is due, Dana can’t pay it, and so we have motivation. Dana thinks he’s God’s gift to women and puts himself out as gigolo on Craig’s List but his only response comes from a gay writer Steven (Michael Colavolpe). Dana is straight, but Pay for Gay doesn’t seem like problem to him, so soon he’s in the money. He finds more work in spanking videos under the artistic direction of angry Marty (Toby S Pruett). Steve writes ad copy for Marty, and his when his brother Tim (Jamie Kline) moves in, he sees money in making their own porn, and soon everyone is getting rich. Find a niche market and fill it, that’s what they teach in business school.

Bizarre as the story is, there’s plenty of comedy here. On one hand McConnell has the perfect dopy attitude to play a dumber-than-Joe Buck gigolo, and Pruett has the psychotic anger of Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet. When he hauls off and swats McConnell’s butt, the sound is shocking and strawberry enormous. Kline and Colavolpe are a solid paring, they did seem like brothers, Steve (or was it Sean) as the older gay writer and Kline as the younger, straight guy with business sense. Dana had a girlfriend Sandy (Heather Delmotte) but she seemed much too intellectual to hang out with Dana. For a scene or two it looked like she might hook up with Eugene, they seemed like they would actually have something to discuss together after their 5th anniversary. This show has nudity and spanking, but it has an internal logic and cohesiveness that makes it much more enjoyable than its exploitive synopsis might suggest.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org

Annie Todd
By David Strauss and Nicole Carson
Directed by Paul Castaneda
Greater Orlando Actors Theatre
Green Venue, 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival

It’s obviously impossible to squeeze a mega musical like “Annie” into the hour slot you get in the Fringe festival, so why not add “Sweeney Todd” to the playbill? By cleverly switching between plots and combining the good music you can ditch the boring stuff and the songs no one want to hear anyway. Strauss and Carson have pulled off this musical vivisection, and it careens along at double time. Daddy Warbucks (Brett Carson) lost track of little Anne (Mira Strauss) and she wanders back to Miss Hannibal’s (Carson) orphanage. Warbucks might not have done right by her, and now she’s out for revenge. After all, working as a child prostitute for 20 cents a night won’t pay the bills, not even in post war Brooklyn. Meanwhile, Hannigan and Rooster (Rob DelMedico) are feeding the orphans stray dogs, so there a plot device and a Chekhovian knife just waiting to be used. Anne corners Warbucks, the rest….well, it’s a bloody big production number.

The acting from this crew of local regulars is superb, this is one the strongest roles I’ve seen Carson perform. Strauss plays Sandy in an award looking puppy suit, and his butt-dragging exit was his top performance. A.C. smith plays Punjab, Warbucks’ assistant, and does a decent 7-11 counter clerk accent while looking tall and elegant. Mira Strauss as Anne didn’t thrill me, even for a child her voice doesn’t seem ready to fill a room and stay on note. I would have like to see more of Pepperelli (Nicky Urban) but his role was one that got sliced to fit everything else in. What you’ll remember most are the songs, from “Attend To The Tale of Annie Todd” to “The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow”. Their clever parodies, and while the shows took some nips and tucks to splice together, it’s the songs than make for a great musical.

This event is part of the 2010 Orlando International Fringe Festival. For schedule and ticket information, please visit http://OrlandoFringe.org