2019 Hollywood Fringe Roundup

By Stephen Fife
Through August 24

This year, on the 10^th anniversary of the Hollywood Fringe Festival, there were 414 shows, up from around 300 shows only two years ago in 2017.

Several of these received extensions of a few performances or more, and I highly recommend catching any of them if you can.

However, among shows that have closed, Stuff I Think Is Funny and Good, is a sketch comedy show that came with high praise from many quarters. It did not live up to that billing for me. The theme of most of the sketches by Emily Bolcik, Mandi Bossard and Dandy Terkin is how weird and crappy it is to be a young person right now. In the first sketch, a young couple in bed tell each other what they are most afraid of. The woman (Ms. Bossard, I think, but the show had no program) tells her husband that her greatest fear is that a thief will burst in while she’s in the bath and get a whiff of her unwashed vagina. The description of her foul-smelling privates goes on for a very long time. Another sketch has a young woman wanting to leave a sleepover with her woman friends because she is embarrassed to fart in front of them. The sketch ends (spoiler alert) with her farting in front of them and everyone hugging. Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I found it neither funny nor good.

Why Did The Chicken Cross the Road? (Photo by Matthew Hennigar)

Performing at the Complex on Thursday, July 11 at 10 p.m., Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road? by Matthew Hennigar is a 90-minute “comedic quest” (to quote the press release) in which actors are each assigned a word from that familiar joke and try to figure out their meaning and purpose in “the real world.” At some point they meet up with the answer — “To get to the other side” — with, again, each word assigned to a new set of actors; and an existential crisis ensues. The play boasts of “a critically-acclaimed London run.” Hmmm. I would have liked it twice as much at half the length.

The young Bob Leggett outside of band practice in Livin’ The Dream (A Journalistic Journey). (Photo from Prince Edward Academy)

Livin’ The Dream (A Journalistic Journey) is Bob Leggett’s homage to the Hollywood Fringe. Bob has been a critic at every Fringe, where he has become a beloved figure for his pats on the backs to all the performers. In fact, he has loved so many of the one-person shows he’s seen that he thought, why not create one about my own life? Hard to tell, though, how seriously to take Bob’s “Dream.” As he recounts his “adventures” in his high school band, there’s a rip in the time/space continuum that may never heal. Then again, maybe he’s satirizing the many terribly self-serious one-person shows that proliferate during Fringe. When he finally gets to an interesting subject — how his first marriage broke up because his wife was bi-polar and suicidal — he quickly abandons it, saying, “But that’s too private for me to go into.” A part of me felt like yelling: “No Bob! That’s exactly what the memorable shows at Fringe have done, explore ‘private’ places.” While another part of me was wondering if this was an inside joke for Fringers who had seen many such memorable shows, and who would get the put-on of his avoidance. It’s hard to believe that anyone as smart as Bob Leggett would seriously present their memories of band practice for our enjoyment, so I’m going to come down on the side of sly self-mockery and a good-natured, tongue-in-cheek send-up of the autobiographical format. But there’s such a thing as being too oblique, and Bob Leggett still has me guessing.

Georgan George and Troy Rossi in A Night Out, by Harold Pinter.

In Harold Pinter’s A Night Out, a man around 30 (Troy Rossi) who works in an insurance office still lives at home with his overbearing mother (Georgan George). He is the sole focus of her attention, and her smothering affection has killed any interest he has in lighting out on his own. This reticence to go out in pubic includes the big office party — though his office mates finally convince him to go along. Once there, a girl falsely accuses him of groping her; actually, she does it as a favor for another man at the party who has chided our hero for being “a momma’s boy.” This so enrages our hero that he goes home and lashes out at his mother, then finds his power by humiliating a prostitute. It’s a dark, dour play, somewhat dated, but it still packs a punch. The stripping away of the hooker’s last shred of dignity is something that David Mamet “borrowed” for a key scene in his play Edmund, revealing in both cases the source of an empowering misogyny.

Meghan Parks in Wigfield. (Photo by Peter Carrier)

Wigfield is also quite dark, but comically so. Adapted from a book of the same name by Pamela Eberhardt, it tells the twisted tale of would-be writer Russell Hokes (Scott Golden) who wants to write a book about King Arthur’s Knights, but quickly changes to doing one about “disappearing small town America” because a publisher pays him a big advance. He starts looking around for the right “small town” and happens upon Wigfield — which in fact is not a town at all, but simply a collection of squatters who get by turning tricks for truckers and other unsavory acts. This setup is funny and very promising, made even better by the collection of talented actors (Eric Curtis Johnson, Pam Quinn, Bedjou Jean, Emily Clark) who keep coming back as different characters. There’s a maniacal ax killer on the loose — also funny and promising, but then it becomes about saving the town (that doesn’t officially exist) from watery extinction, and it takes a few too many twists and turns to sustain its intended humor. The shame here is letting the play get so plot-heavy that it drowns out so many wonderfully inventive performances.

Lara Helena and Davida Sal in Tales from the Powder Room at The Complex. (Photo by Warren Saire)

Tales from the Powder Room by writer/director Robyn Migel takes place in the ladies room at a high-powered corporate office, where a series of loosely-connected monologues and scenes dramatize the pressure on women in a male-dominated workplace. While a few of the vignettes stray into obvious and over-worked subject matter — such as the opening monologue, where a woman debates with herself over the emotional price of seeking success — there are enough startling dramatic moments and personal revelations to make this worthy of attention. My favorite scene is when two assistants (Burgandi Phoenix and Lara Helena) are griping about what an unholy bitch their boss is, when the toilet flushes and the boss (Sandi Milne) emerges from a stall and lays into them. The boss then delivers a monologue to the audience that turns all our assumptions about her upside-down. Another powerful scene pits a conservative Christian office worker (Helena) against a trans woman (Davida Sal) recently added to their “team.” Both actors display a fearless intensity, and the scene leads to an unexpected and satisfying conclusion. Excellent performances highlight how attractive this play may prove to be for women actors of any age looking for a spotlight to shine in.

Callie Ott in Dear Jeff: A Musical About Suicide & Domestic Abuse. (Photo by Harley Alexander)

Dear Jeff: A Musical Comedy about Suicide & Domestic Abuse is very funny, very sad, and very…real. Callie Ott is that rare performer who is as good a writer as she is a singer. Based on her own experiences, it tells a harrowingly personal tale of falling in love with a bad man who is a good lover. So good in fact that he openly cheats on Callie with several other women, who seem only too happy to be cheated on themselves as long as they can remain a part of this man’s love life. One of the funniest songs in the show is a duel between the normally-shy and anxious Callie and her boyfriend’s other main lover, a streetwise younger woman who takes on Callie in a savage and hilariously weird battle. There are strange twists and turns here, but they all lead somewhere, they are all building to a fascinating climax, in a journey of self-revelation. I’m honestly not sure if I would be applauding as loudly for her boyfriend’s demise if Callie Ott were not such a good singer and witty lyricist, and if she didn’t keep blowing the audience away with her bravado. Ott more than lives up to the expectations that her reputation (and brilliance) have already garnered.

Matt Ritchey in Blackboxing. (Photo by Matt Kamimura)

Finally, Blackboxing is the curious title for Matt Ritchey’s zany and compelling show. Ritchey is a master Fringer, having created and directed a slew of memorable Fringe shows in the past. He clearly delights in the “out there, anything goes” nature of the Fringe, while also being very aware of the many bad one-person shows that it has spawned. This show-within-a-show is a wicked satire of just such a bad show; in fact, it is to Fringe what Spinal Tap was to “Rockumentaries.” Starting with a scrawled-over program for a show called “A Cry for Help” — I actually went back to the house manager, thinking he had given me a program for the wrong show — Blackboxing gives us Travis (Ritchey), a first-time writer-performer who somehow thinks he understands the subtleties of writing and performing while admitting he’s a complete amateur. He’s also the worst nightmare of stage manager Jim (Jim Niedzialkowski), having handed the beleaguered professional a bunch of sheets with 245 hand-written cues. (The show is subtitled “Man vs. Stage Manager.”) It’s a treat for any theater-lover to see how Ritchey and director Matthew Martin keep all these balls in the air — as satire, physical comedy, original song-and-dance, primal scream, family drama, meta performance piece, and more — while continuing to shade in his portrait of a theatrical novice headed for a breakdown.

Yes, it’s a parody of everything the Fringe represents, but it’s also a celebration of Fringe, and of the elements of pure theater. Unlike Bob Leggett’s show, I always knew what Ritchey was going for, while at the same time he was always surprising with how he got there. There are some transitions that could be developed further, and the final slide into seriousness arrives too quickly and ends too abruptly. But Blackboxing — that is, playing around in a blackbox theater space — is one of the most inventive pieces to be seen at any Fringe, and one that hopefully won’t disappear when the final curtain has fallen on the 2019 Hollywood Fringe.

WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?: Thurs. July 11, 10 PM at the Flight Theater at the Complex, 6472 Santa Monica Blvd. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5798?tab=tickets. Running time: 90 minutes, no intermission.

BLACKBOXING: Sat. July 13, 10 PM at the Dorie Theatre in the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5704?tab=tickets. Running time is 55 minutes, no intermission.

DEAR JEFF: Wed. July 24, 8 PM at Studio C, 6448 Santa Monica Blvd. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/5884?tab=tickets. Running time: 55 minutes, no intermission.

TALES FROM THE POWDER ROOM: Fri. August 9, 8 PM at the Dorie Theatre at the Complex, 6476 Santa Monica Blvd. www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/6190?tab=tickets. Running time: 60 minutes, no intermission.