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Final Letter from the Fringe
Uber Alles
By Paul Birchall
You want to know who was having the best time at the Hollywood Fringe? I’ll tell you: the Uber drivers. No, seriously. If you just hung out in front of the Complex or the Elephant at almost any time during the festival, you’d have been astonished by the long line of Ubers and Lyfts that pulled up, one after the other, to disgorge a seemingly endless procession of audience members and performers, all making use of the ride-sharing service to zip from one theater to the next. It’s a particular benefit to folks who are making a day of the Fringe, perhaps seeing three or four shows in a row, but needing to get rather long distances in quick time.
Just last night, I found myself emerging from a theater at the Complex (Santa Monica Blvd., near Wilcox) at 8:15 and needing to zip to Theater of NOTE (Cahuenga Blvd., north of Sunset) for a show at 8:30. The Uber got me there like a Star Trek Transporter. And, after spotting my badge, I have to confess the Uber driver revealed that he was a comedian performing frequently at one of the Improv Olympic-y theaters at the Complex. His girlfriend was in a fringe show herself. Welcome to Los Angeles, where even (and perhaps especially) your Uber driver is chasing some theatrical dream.
As it turns out, the show I saw at Theater of NOTE, playwright Jaime Andrews’ scathingly brilliant Cookie and The Monster, was a personal Fringe highlight. Andrews’s dark comedy takes trappings of a teen coming of age tale, and uses them as a launching point to showcase chilling, and self-destructive aspects of the human soul. Young school girl Cookie (Andrews, nicely quirky) has a unique invisible best friend – a gigantic, hirsute monster (Scott Leggett, resplendent in shredded rags and a skunk fur-colored hat), who is her constant, dependable companion. Monster is jolly and cheerful – but he represents every horrible thought and self destructive subconscious desire that has ever lurked in our ID. Cookie is powerless to rebuff the creature, even though under his influence she turns into a school bully, then a school slut, and finally she’s hooked on drugs and booze to the extent that she is forced to become a stripper to pay for it.
Cookie and the Monster
Director JJ Mayes’s wonderfully ironic staging milks sorrow for laughter just as it milks humor for pain — this makes the heroine’s tribulations all the more harrowing. Performances crackle with detail and wisdom, from Curt Bonnem’s gravelly turn as Cookie’s hateful dad (who happens to be shadowed by an invisible monster of his own), to Perry Daniel as Cookie’s seemingly clueless, but ultimately quite wise mother. However, it’s the disturbing interactions between Andrews’s clearly damaged Cookie and Leggett’s Falstaffian, diabolical monster that carry the show – particularly during its incredibly creepy showstopper, a song in praise of cutting one’s skin with knives.
Back by Uber to the Hudson Guild to see another coming of age tale, Marc Francoeur’s heartfelt, if somewhat slight musical, Skanky Me From Kankakee, in which Francoeur, details his childhood growing up in a benighted Illinois suburb, where he struggled to come out of the closet and find his true self, amidst an environment of All American homogeneity. Some of the stuff doesn’t sound as terrible as it might be — there are some blow jobs in cornfields, after all, and the hero does become a champion baton twirler in high school (no, really, he does), but the exceedingly likable Francoeur dreams of nothing more than ankling Kankakee for a life in some more glamorous berg.
Francoeur’s score is delightful -– full of heartfelt melodies and lyrics that are sincere and passionate. However, the plot itself is lacking in strong narrative heft, consisting of incidents that seem neither horrifying enough to suggest why you’d need to leave town, nor folksy enough to inspire nostalgia. However, director Nancy Dobbs Owen’s concept of having the other characters, whether male or female, all be played by a supporting ensemble of all women is ingenious and clever. Francoeur, with his burly, beefy frame, is a little hard to imagine in the role of a sensitive gay twink – but it’s his assured organic connection to his story that allows his character to be ultimately quite convincing and engaging. Also delightful in a variety of supporting roles are the ensemble of female performers, including Terri Turco as Francoeur’s much put upon mother, and Ylin Wentland (in man drag) as his taciturn dad.
For a musical of a very different type, there’s the ensemble-created Timeheart, a lively, quirky science fiction musical at the Elephant Asylum theater. With book and music credited to “Robot Teammate and the Accidental Party” (the group’s head writer is Chris Bramante), the play follows the story of nebbishy Bruce (Dave Reynolds), who, in 1976, invents a time machine that allows him to travel forward into the future several hundred years. Appearing aboard the ramshackle space station that has become humanity’s last home, Bruce discovers that his own time travel has essentially crippled the universe. Teaming up with a seemingly deranged Professor (Chris Bramanta) and Melody (Molly Dworsky), the owner of a futuristic tavern, Bruce battles supervillain Lord Antagang (Miles Crosman) to rescue the mysterious “soul” of the universe, The Timeheart (Kat Primeau).
Timeheart: Molly Dworsky, Chris Bramante, Dave Reynolds
In a production that pays delightful homage to many of nerd sci-fi’s greatest hits, from Barbarella to Golden Era Doctor Who, and then to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, director Bryan Cain’s staging is quick paced, cheerful, and even unexpectedly thought provoking. Musical numbers are light and punchy, and the score doesn’t take itself too seriously –though Primeau’s lovely soprano-esque intermittent interruptions as the spirit of the Timeheart are quite eerie. Set and special effects are a little dodgy — still better than in the mid-‘70s era Doctor Who — but given this is the fringe, the scope and range of the storytelling are quite compelling.
Upon leaving one of these shows, I shlepped across the street and headed to the Hollywood Fringe Party Central. This year, the Center was at the Dragonfly, the occasional hipster club next door to the Second Stage. It has the ambiance of a night club. The result was a party center that was half barfly and half theater geek — a rather charming milieu that made you wonder why Los Angeles has never been able to make a go of a cafe or bar that caters specifically to theater people on its own terms. There were also food trucks in the back. While purchasing my huge, onion-covered kielbasa from the Polish food truck, I noticed a small crowd forming across the street. There was a handsome young man roaring lines from Hamlet at the top of his voice! Suddenly he ripped off his shirt and pulled down his pants right in front of the crowd.
No, this wasn’t a crazed thespian’s attempt at indecent exposure, it was a promotional scene from Hamlet Mobile, a site specific production of the Bard’s play about the Prince of Elsinore. Waggling my kielbasa in his general direction, I headed across the street to the area in front of the boozy Wilcox Avenue liquor store which had become the impromptu stage. The nearly nekkid Hamlet was performing an early scene in which he confronts his Uncle Claudius, who, in this production was whisked off by his Gertrude into a run down van idling by the side of the road. As the van peeled into traffic, the sounds of the royal couple arguing inside the vehicle could be heard as they drove off into the distance. The street audience was invited to walk on down to a nearby street corner to see the next scene. I, however, returned to my kielbasa at the Dragonfly.
Final show of my Frorgy (Fringe orgy, and don’t tell me I’m the only one having one) was Camenot, a charming little improv show at the Complex. Featuring the Acme Theater, the group enters dressed in Arthurian garb — armor and tunics for the dudes, wench-y gowns for the gals. They then take word suggestions from the audience, and the words are used to whip up a Harold-y narrative set in the middle ages. This sort of thing, sadly, almost always depends on the quality of the suggestions: For my performance, the audience rather hopelessly suggested “horse” and “meadow,” so the ensuing skit (about a young peasant with the ability to talk to horses and muster animals into an army) was a little less than glittery, but even the tepidly enthralling story provided opportunities for some cracklingly funny character acting work, especially Kimberly Lewis, pitch perfect as a cold-hearted wicked queen, and Brian Breiter as a wicked knight.
Read Paul Birchall’s First Letter From the Fringe
