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Five years in, what does the Hollywood Fringe actually mean? Plus reviews of “The Divine Teat,” “Women,” “The Perfect Lover,” “Fancy: Secrets From my Bootydoir,” “Wearhorse,” “The Best of Craigslist: Live!” and “Linden Arden Stole the Highlights”
Our critics are all over Hollywood this weekend, for the first of what will be a two-week binge of Fringe Festival reviews and commentary. Is all of L.A. theater really just as geographically expanded Fringe festival, as Don Shirley once suggested? What is the purpose and the result of curation? The Fringe festival is a famously come-one-come all event. Anybody who wants to put on a show can do so, at cut rates, compared to renting a venue for a traditional six-week run. There is no curation. It’s as democratic an event as any festival that can be imagined. The market is the judge. . . Well, almost. . .
Alice Tuan’s “Hit” at LATC is very much like Los Angeles. You try to define it, to circumscribe it, and it slips out from your grasp. Rather, the play emotes a feeling, a comedic, horrific depiction of how we’ve learned, or been seduced by macroeconomics, to keep crashing into each other and fleeing, eating and fucking, rising and falling.
Theatre Unleashed’s Gregory Crafts says we’re either a community of Luddites, or we just don’t care enough as a community to do what it takes to get the word out about what we do beyond the echo chamber of usual suspects. Crafts has a concrete proposal for the use of social media at the upcoming Hollywood Fringe. He offers the challenge: You want to change things, do something? It’s not that difficult: It’s called tweeting.
Poet/drama critic Clem takes over “Notes from Arden” with his compellingly unorthodox take on Antaeus Company’s production of “Top Girls,” which he caught last week. That review appears with a sampling of Clem’s poetry that he insisted we include as part of his contribution.
Has NoHo turned into the West Village? — So many theater people we randomly ran into on a single Sunday afternoon near Lankershim and Magnolia, plus politically charged theater from Anteaus Company to City Garage
Jimmy Im gave L.A. theater a gift on April 10. It wasn’t intended as such. His article in “Vanity Fair” proclaimed our theater dead-on-arrival and provoked a galvanizing retort from the entire stage community.
John Steppling is miffed about the way he is treated in “Stage Rows” and “Stage Raw” this week. Steven Leigh Morris responds.
There she hung, the “Mona Lisa,” small frame, big reputation, enigmatic smile, the whole thing, but “Stage Raw” couldn’t get close because of the rows and rows of people – layers really – separating Lisa from the eyes of this beholder with the incessant flashing of iPhone cameras, as though they could actually capture The Real Thing.
Welcome to Issue 2 of Stage Raw!
We continue to take small steps to expand coverage of the arts and the arts community in and beyond Los Angeles. We thank you for your support, and hope that you will stay tuned: the best is yet to come.
