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The Best of Albuquerque Fringe 2025
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Elephant Space
Through June 28
On paper, writer-performer-creators Jim Blanchette and Jacob Smith’s idea to spoof their Hollywood Fringe Festival hosts by staging the “fringiest of fringe shows” magically transported from the future reads like the recipe for a surefire satiric laugh-fest. Why the results only prove sporadically amusing may have less to do with any failings on the part of The Best of Albuquerque Fringe 2025’s high-octane comedy ensemble than in the difficulty of pinning down the amorphous nature of Fringe in order to caricature it.
Smith and Lauren Flans, playing unctuously insincere hosts of the “Second Annual Best of Albuquerque Fringe Awards,” preside over an evening of rapid-fire sketches that range from sendups of mangled massacres of Senecan tragedy (featuring Blanchette) to brittle, one-liner rips on the ubiquity of one-person fringe shows (with Sam Tank and Heather Lake) to a bizarrely surreal, extended non-sequitur about a visiting troupe of lowbrow Belgian music hall clowns (Blanchette, Smith, Lake, Flans, Lisa K. Wyatt and Liz Fenning) that make Benny Hill seem like the height of sophistication by comparison.
Interestingly, it is only when the sketches reach beyond fringe to the broader popular culture that the show strikes the critical balance between recognizable homage and exaggeration that delivers laughs. Those bits tend to be musical parodies, like Sam Tank’s impersonation of Liam Neeson in the tango-riffed “Taken: The Musical,” or Fenning and Tank rapping their way through the Sling Blade knockoff, “Slingin’: The Musical.”
The Elephant Space, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd., through June 28. www.Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2189
Fuck You Jason! or Medea
Reviewed by Bill Raden
Elephant Space
Through June 28
Benny Lee Harris Lumpkins Jr.’s starkly staged and stripped-down modern-dress adaptation of Euripides’s primal tale of a woman scorned comes as yet another reminder of just how powerful a grip Greek tragedy can continue to exert on an audience even under the heavily ironic veneer of a contemporary concept staging.
In this case, Lumpkins Jr.’s “graphic novel” production, which transposes the play’s action to a vaguely Godfather-esque, gangland milieu, places its emphasis on the implicit tension between the omertà-like code followed by Creon (played in pinstripes and fedora by Michael Hutchinson) and the unconstrained violence of the barbarian Medea (Lesli Harad), who lives by the vendetta.
To that end, Harad, mascara-smudged and her hair teased into a wild mane, is particularly effective. Playing her entrance as a bitter drunk scene, the actress persuasively conveys the convulsive dimensions of a fury so unhinging that it can only end in the play’s unnatural act of revenge and madness.
Daniela Pompeu provides able support as the nurse, who for some reason gropes her way around the stage as a blind woman. And Alex Maxwell is a capable if blustery Jason. The show’s most bizarre if weirdly enjoyable conceit is costuming its three-woman chorus (nicely performed by Stepy Kamei, Valeria Rifici and Lori Mulligan) in sexy, neon-colored netted workout tee shirts, hot pants and bikini bottoms, as if they’re ring girls at a championship boxing or wrestling match. Which, come to think of it, isn’t an entirely inappropriate metaphor for Medea.
The Elephant Space, 6322 Santa Monica Blvd., Hlywd., through June 28. www.Hollywoodfringe.org/projects/2250
