Today’s WaPo has an article mentioning Michael Bobbitt’s helming the Adventure Theater in Glen Echo Park as artistic director. The theater’s been newly renovated and is kicking off this Saturday. It’s a pretty fair value at $12 a seat, I think, but you can come enjoy some of the festivities for free, including crafts for the kids, a storyteller at 12:30 and 3p, and tours and a chance to watch some of the rehersal for their upcoming “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” show. If you’re willing to part with some coin the The Secret Garden is at 1:30p

As Micheal is quoted in the Post story, “Where else can you go and see a play and then ride a carousel?” Capitol Weather predicts clear skies and temps in the 50s - not great carousel weather but hey, it’s November.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they do and hope they’re roaringly successful. I’ve met Micheal a few times, most recently at Fringe when attending the show he directed, Queen of the Bohemian Dream. I’m hesitant to mention this, given that it’s one of the couple of shows I never got around to writing up, despite being one of the ones my darling girlfriend and I enjoyed the most.

Of course the real reason I’m ashamed is that I failed to do the writeup after he was so gracious to us personally. We came in having hustled over from another show and found ourselves taking a couple of the last few seats. They were at the top corner of the bleachers…. right under a positively roaring air conditioning vent. When he was walking by I recognized him and waved at him to ask him if I had time to dash out to the car for a coat for my shivering darling girlfriend. He said no, they were about to start… and doffed his own jacket and handed it over. A nice thing to do for anyone, but particularly thoughtful for someone he’d only ever been introduced to in passing. That same generosity comes across on the blog where he writes about some of the goings-ons at Adventure and solicits feedback and suggestions for future shows. Give it a look.

image courtesy of The Neo-Futurists

Metroblogging Chicago has been holding out on us. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind came to Wooly Mammoth by way of the Chicago troupe The Neo-Futurists. Over at Chicago Metblogs there’s at least three different articles that Fuzzy has written about them and their projects.

I managed to get in to see their signature piece at Wooly at the last minute and was glad I did. Presenting thirty plays in sixty minutes, TMLMTBGB is a collection of shorts that are written by the people that are performing them. In this case it was Bilal Dardai, Dean Evans, Sharon Greene, Kristie Koehler, and Jay Torrence. When I got to speak to Sharon after the show I found out exactly what this means to the content of the show.

The neo-futurists are up-front about the way the show is conducted - a clothesline which has the numbers one through thirty hangs across the stage, just out of easy reach - and what hangs on that clothesline changes from show to show, as one or more shows come out of the rotation and are replaced by others. It’s performed by the person who wrote it and may include some or all of the rest of the ensemble.

What’s not obvious from the introduction or the handout is the fact that the neo-futurists are comprised of more than these five performers. Notably more, in fact, as when I asked Sharon about traveling shows or for-hires she said they had enough people to run one or two traveling shows and keep the weekly performances in Chicago running, all at once. Which means that not only does any show you wander into get changed between runs, it gets changed based on the potentially changing cast as well.

The really criminal thing here in this writeup is that I’ve made it to paragraph five before telling you that it was 100% awesome. Every performer was bursting with energy and clearly having a great time, something that made every single play fun even if I didn’t care for it. Not that there were many I didn’t find delightful, though some pieces like 26,558 were moving and powerful and completely delight-free. I’m going to be in Chicago next month, and #1 on my list of things to do is going to be to catch at least one show so I can share this fun with my darling girlfriend.

In the interest of finally wrapping this up (not to mention getting a little more content up here today - I think we’re all just in shock that we somehow moved to Oregon and nobody told us), this is the quickest of my remaining Fringe writeups. It’s also the most eh of what I have left.

Petpourri was one of the most common of Fringe maladies, the cabaret show. My darling girlfriend and I went to this one with the expectation that it would be at worst a little treacle-y and and best amusing. We seemed to have been in the minority - a friend’s reaction was “you WENT to that?”

Were this the trainwreck that certain other shows had been I’d give them that as fair play, but it was fine, if not what we expected. The four person cast from the In Series acquitted themselves well enough, though I’d say Richard Tappen consistently performed an order of magnitude better than his costars. One lone song turned up the schmaltz to 11, with another a little heavy on the cheese but acceptable.

The biggest issue I had with it was I found the material uninspired and a little limp. I can hear you already: I decided to go to a cabaret show with a pet theme - what did I expect? Something a little more contemporary (half the material was depression era), maybe a little funnier if not ironic. Ah well. I found the performance and the players impressive enough that I’ll consider going to their upcoming shows, Moon / Dance or maybe Cole & Noel.

photo courtesy of DJ Riel

Well, I’ve been pretty derelict in my posting the last few weeks. Sorry - I’ve been working on three fairly major life changes (no Wayan, none of those are my gender), one of which is a new place of employment. Between the stress and the short-timer’s disease it’s played hell with my productivity.

I’ve still got four Fringe shows to write up and tell you about. While that might seem a little pointless, all four were interesting in their content and were put on by local folks with more things to come. Several may show up again in another venue and besides, if I don’t tell you about one of them then how will you know where to go take trapeze lessons?

I will admit, however, that in none of these will I be able to tell you about any vacuums, dwarves, or dwarves’ penises. Edinburgh, the start of it all, continues to be farther out there than us. Thank grod.

image courtesy of Jonathan Padget

The Blue Lagoon: A Musical exists as a perfect counter-point to the suck-fest what was Carrie Potter and the Half-blood Prom. I feel somewhat guilty talking about the two in the same sentence but I just want to underscore what a difference talent, attitude, talent, effort, and talent can make when creating a fun but light-hearted show. Everything else that Carrie Potter had was also in The Blue Lagoon, only used to positive effect rather than lazily.

Writer Jonathan Padget created this little bit of fun based on the book that the movie was based on (who knew?) and staged it in a little room that seated less than fifty.The few props included a hose, kiddie pool, - the lagoon itself, don’t you know - a few suitcases and the inevitable baby. When Kathleen Mason as Emmeline breaks the fourth wall she does it by singing about how she is stranded with her cousin, her first cousin, and she’s only repeating that because it’s going to be significant. Cousin Richard is played by Matthew McGloin as a wonderfully earnest and horny teenage boy who’s happily keeping Emmeline safe… and providing some ’swimming lessons’ in the lagoon. The point being made about first cousins is pretty well underscored by the arrival of a baby that seems to have 50% more eyesight than its parents. But hey, that just make the baby extra special. And look - Emmeline isn’t fat anymore! How about another swim, cuz?

Hopefully creator Jonathan Padget will find a way to bring The Blue Lagoon around again so some more people can see it, either in stage or some other format. Personally I think it would make a great multi-part youtube feature.

Josh Speerstra as Plucky the ghost elf, Baughman as Jesus the narrator, Jen Tonon as Rhonda

What the hell, I’ve got the knives out and sharpened, let’s get yank this bandaid all the way off so I can start talking about things that didn’t suck. My second-worst Fringe experience this year was Carrie Potter and the Half-Blood Prom. I think what’s worth mentioning here is that dissapointing an audience who’s walked into what is obviously going to be a gag on Harry Potter and the movie Carrie takes some work. None of us walked in the door expecting genius-level writing, brilliant songs, or flawless staging. Instead what we got was the dream made reality for anyone who ever went to see a Cherry Red show and thought to themselves “this would be way better if the staging wasn’t so precise, the story so tight, the acting so regal, the costumes so elaborate, and the cast so awake.”

I honestly feel dirty comparing this show to anything Cherry Red ever offered up. While both groups set out to make something silly and fun, I never once was made to feel in a CR show that they flat out didn’t give a crap how well they did anything. The actors in Carrie Potter wander about, make flubs that stink of a lack of rehearsal, and just overall fail to entertain. Unlike Butter, where you kind of feel bad for the apparent lack of awareness of what’s not good and not working, this show just gave you the sense that they didn’t care.

There’s some funny stuff in here, though it’s over-used in a tedious way. “Transitional song” is probably the best example of this, a piece that Baughman and the band do several times in between scenes. It made me snicker the first time and then was pulled back out again with no improvement or elaboration. Before the show begins Geeky Kid, played by Ally Jenkins, comes out in character and demands all the audience members take a post-it and write a phrase on it that will be read at some point in the show. “Because,” we’re told, “the script isn’t very good.” Could have been funny, but again, done in a half-assed manner. Five minutes into the show Carrie Potter, played by Jennifer Berg, picks one up on the stage floor, where they’ve been scattered, and realizes they’d read that one already. Obviously nobody has considered what to do with the notes once they’re read or if there’s a dupe. Instead it just hits a flat note and we move on.

I came to this show expecting nothing more than goofs and laughs… and that the performers wanted to have fun with us and cared if we had fun. There wasn’t the slightest indication that they gave a rat’s ass, or at least not enough of one to make more than the most minimal of efforts. The next time you take my $15 I’d appreciate a little interest and energy.

Under other circumstances I might be tempted to come up with some quip here about artery-clogging and the name of this show, or something in that vein. Even five days later, however, the suckitude of this event, start to finish, continues to lay on me like a smothering blanket. My darling girlfriend and I only had two unpleasant experiences at Fringe this year and this one won the race to the bottom. By about a mile. Or twelve.

Part of me feels bad pulling out the knives for this. Butter: A Love Story is, after all, the creation of a person who signed up to present at Fringe because she had something to say and a passion to perform, and a big part of the Fringe mission is providing such people with a venue they wouldn’t otherwise have. The problem is that while Cantwell’s creation had a somewhat interesting idea and story, she’s clearly got no awareness of that fact that she’s just flat-out bad and there’s apparently a lot of people failing to give her anything resembling constructive guidance. The show she put on could have been somewhat fun and interesting - if not fantastic - if it was done with the awareness that her singing and acting are, to say the least, rough.

The concept of the show is that Sandy Patti has, though pluck and determination, managed to get herself a cooking show despite the fact that she isn’t much of a cook. “Almost home cooking,” she calls it, this assembling of pre-made food into something more for the sake of entertaining. The fact that she’s out of her depth and not quite up to the challenge that she’s set herself up for would be a fine way to make Cantwell’s weaknesses work for her. It wouldn’t even contradict the empowerment message that she’s woven into the show. If it might be a little to winking and ironic, well, that’s almost a requirement at Fringe anyway.

Instead it’s sad and painful, as both Cantwell and her creation Sandy Patti cause you to wince your way through an hour as she’s flat, fails to hit notes, hams it up in all the wrong ways, and just generally make you wish someone would take her aside and say “you are completely failing in what you’re setting out to do.” Somehow I doubt it’s going to happen - the program for Butter included not only thanks to her voice instructor but an ad from him as well. Seeing this show isn’t an enticement to hire him, it’s a warning. The best thing Cantwell could do is realize that if he’s telling her she’s sufficiently competent to do these shows at her current level then he’s pretty clearly unable to accurately asses her and her skill.

Barring that, the rest of us need to just stay away from his teaching and her performing.

logo courtesy of ZipCar

Must be hump day here at Metblogs as well as everywhere else - only two posts before noon? I blame myself - I owe y’all more than half a dozen Fringe reports. Soon, I swear! In the mean time if you’re interested in joining the Car-free DC crowd there was a flyer in one of my Fringe handouts from sponsor Zipcar: join now and use promo code ‘capfringe’ and get $50 in driving credit. Presumably you Alexandria residents can stack this with the reimbursal your city offers.

With today, the second annual DC Fringe Festival draws to a close. I’ve got a backlog of shows to tell you about, primarily ones that I saw today or at their last showing, reducing my pressure to get a writeup out to you. You can look forward to (or dread) my analysis of Air Heart, The Blue Lagoon: A Musical, Butter: a love story, Carrie Potter at the Half Blood Prom, Petpourri, Queen of the Bohemian Dream, Reefer Madness: The Musical, and Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.

As soon as I get some SLEEP.

The first of my three Fringe outings yesterday was the Super Secret Show at Noon, which was, as the narrator said, “possibly the earliest burlesque performance ever… I’m still asleep. So I’ll just be phoning it in.” Maybe true, but his phoning was about a million times more entertaining than my last show of the day, Butter. But more about that train wreck later - we’re here to talk about some burlesque.

Let’s cut to the chase: Get off your ass and go to this show tonight. Aside from the fact that it’s smart, funny, and dumb in all the best ways, the burlesque aspect is well done and enjoyable. You’ll get suckered initially into thinking this is just going to be some silliness with some pseudo-striptease only to see the routines get more complex and impressive. Which doesn’t even address the hysterical use of flashlights to do a piece set to “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Hell, Trixie Little’s trapeze act is worth the price of admission alone. The tenuous plot to hold it all together manages to be a perfect balance - not too pointless or moronic but also not taking itself more seriously than it deserves.

The show is a gas and a fun hour. It also has the advantage tonight of being at 9pm at Warehouse, which is having it’s farewell party tonight. There’s still going to be theater there starting again in September but the music and - sob - the bar will be gone. Come mourn and have a laugh break in the middle and I’ll see you after my last show lets out of Playbill at 9.

9pm July 29th at Warehouse Arts - Mainstage
1021 7th Street NW
Washington, DC 20001