All Entries in the "Fringe Reviews" Category
Fringe Review: The Black Glass
The Black Glass is a dark poetic story of greed and moral corruption, written and directed with sharp skill by Guy Zimmerman. Donald Bentham is being blackmailed on the night before his promotion, in return for becoming the CEO, he must offer his daughter up to a very sinister Thomas McGivern. While the setting is [...]
Fringe Review: Mission to Mate
Three short plays, three opportunities to explore a different couple coming together Colin Mitchell’s comic drama Mission to Mate. Each short play has a different take, and a different hook, but displays Mitchell’s ability to paint image with words, with a strong cast of Alla Poberesky and Michael Sanchez playing multiple roles. Twinkle in Your [...]
Fringe Reviews: Cycles
“Cycles” by Robert Litz is a well acted, sharply directed and crisply written piece that only suffers from a decidedly forced plot point inflicted on the work by the playwright in an needless effort to crank up the drama as the piece rounds into home stretch. Litz might have pulled it off but for the [...]
Fringe Reviews: The Omnipresent Puppet Theater’s “Gumshoe McMonocle and the Strange Case of Rumpelsomething”
The Omnipresent Puppet Theater’s production of “Gumshoe McMonocle and the Strange Case of Rumpelsomething” is a throw back. Hand puppets, the real primitive sort, not the ones where the eyes roll and nose wrinkles, we’re talking sock-puppets. The stage, the “puppet stage” looks like Uncle Ralph built it for you in his garage one afternoon weekend; and the [...]
Fringe Reviews: CYCLES rides past expectations
Cycles, written by Robert Litz and directed by Stefan Lysenko, starts with a simple picture: two mismatched exercise bicycles talked over by two mismatched men, Jake and Buzz. They give small talk and chit chat, switching so quickly to intimate details and personal information, one has to question if Jake and Buzz knew each other [...]
Fringe Review: Anaconda
Anaconda, written and directed by Sarah Doyle, starts out promising enough, with a very intriguing hook, but, ultimately fails to gain traction. Matty Buttiker, played by Martin Dingle Wall, is a criminal defense attorney who takes on a pro bono murder case to help a man from his past. Buttiker is trying to make amends [...]
Fringe Review: Voices in My Head
You have heard Bill Ratner’s voice before. Somewhere. Some time. You have heard it. For me, he is a voice from my childhood. He was the voice of Flint, one of the leaders of GI Joe (and to be frank, far cooler than Duke.) So, at first, it was hard for me to shake those [...]
Fringe Reviews: Richard Parker
Reviewed by Dany Margolies, reprinted courtesy of www.ArtsInLA.com Two men, one boat, and a world of existentialism combine onstage in this British import. Owen Thomas’ script is an interesting meditation on fate, coincidence, nature, indeed many forces bigger than ourselves—and the parts we play in them. In the first scene, two men meet on shipboard [...]
Fringe Reviews: Into the Torrent Sea
Reviewed by Dany Margolies, reprinted courtesy of www.ArtsInLA.com Until this one-person show gets a revamping, the subtitle suffices for storytelling, because the production adds almost nothing extra. “The Lost Journal of Grace O’Malley, the Pirate Queen of Connaught” reveals the setup, the who, and the where. It is hoped Sandra Caruso decides to go further [...]
Fringe Review: Flesh Eating Tiger
More art installation than narrative play, Flesh Eating Tiger written and directed by Amy Tofte explores being in a relationship with an alcoholic, the ups and the downs, the passion that drives the sex and the anger. What’s truly interesting about the piece, we, as the audience, are on the INSIDE of the experience, in [...]
Fringe Reviews: Mission to Mate
Went to see “Mission to Mate”, written and directed by Colin Mitchell, (please see selection list at page bottom). What can I say, I laughed, I cried, it made me a better person. Well, okay two out of three. In a trio of tightly crafted, loosely linked scenes, Mitchell blithely takes us tap-dancing across that heavily mined [...]
Fringe Review: Richard Parker
The power of Coincidence is insanely explored in the very funny, very dark play Richard Parker by Owen Thomas. Two men meet on a ship at sea… is it a coincidence… both think it’s a lovely day, both are headed to a funeral, both are trying to quit smoking… and both are named Richard Parker. [...]
Fringe Review: The Relationship Play
Time marches on, even when you’re not there, that’s what the main character begins to learn in The Relationship Play by Nadine Svea Nonn. Julie (Nonn) has returned back to her London home for a visit from New York City, where she’s studying fashion design. She’s there to see her friends and catch up. Very [...]
Fringe Review: Fierce Interventions
A collection of three short plays produced by Fierce Backbone featuring stories about, well… intervention. (Though nicely dodging the very easy choice of drugs and booze.) First up Banana Intervention by Jeremy Kehoe, about two friends (Sean Welch and Ashley McGee) confronting a third (Will Blagrove) about his addiction to eating bananas. It’s a funny [...]
Fringe Review: Eggshell
Don’t expect easy answers, because there are very few to find in Eggshell, a physical comedy show written and directed by Soren Olsen. Told in gibberish, in an abstract world, three workers work for… or through… the desires… maybe… of Giant Egg on stage. In the first half of the play, the Egg has power over [...]
Fringe Reviews: Tape
I find Identity Productions’ Tape moderately mediocre on the level of much Fringe and most Los Angeles storefront theater: a pudgy, imagination-free production of a play whose only appeal should be to people with tastes shaped by acronym detective TV shows (which the author, Stephen Belber, sometimes writes). But with the possible exception of Colin [...]
Fringe Reviews: Mission to Mate
Bitter Lemons editor Colin Mitchell turns the tables in more ways than one with his scintillatingly sexy threesome of one-acts starring Alla Poberesky and Michael Sanchez. Unlike typical male-female dynamics, Mitchell flips the archetypal roles in each of his plays by pitting a strong-willed, dominant woman against a sensitive but affable guy grasping for understanding [...]
Fringe Reviews: Rise
Cal Barnes’ two-hander is a wild ride pitting former junkies with a past in a room that ticks down the time like a bomb ready to explode. It doesn’t hurt that his actors and director are all from last year’s ‘Best of Fringe’ “Pulp Shakespeare” with Brett Colbeth charmingly playing Henry Donner, an evangelical preacher [...]
Fringe Reviews: Mixed Personality Disorders
David Michael Taylor’s trip down memory lane begins with a long-winded multimedia tour through Moundsville, WV—a coal mining community whose claim to fame are prehistoric burial mounds and a retired gothic penitentiary. It’s the kind of town where The Great Depression never left, but Taylor’s humorous, desperate desire to flee his hometown is akin to [...]
Fringe Reviews: Three Tables
Presented by Samedi Productions Reviewed by Dany Margolies, reprinted courtesy of www.ArtsInLA.com Three couples at various stages in their relationships occupy three tables in Dan Remmes’ 25-minute “piece” that unfortunately doesn’t quite meet the standards of a “play.” Its length is not the problem: LA theatergoers have seen two and a half minutes of theater [...]
Fringe Reviews: Gumshoe McMonocle and the Strange Case of Rumpelsomething
Presented by Omnipresent Puppet Theater (www.omnipuppets.org) Reviewed by Dany Margolies, reprinted courtesy of www.ArtsInLA.com Bah, it’s a show for kids, right? Very wrong. The magic of puppetry and the mystery of our mind’s ability to see real people in the hands, literally, of a puppeteer make this charmer appealing to all ages. The story of [...]
Fringe Reviews: O!EDIPUS
A promising beginning which turns into a missed opportunity for O!edipus, a new play written, directed and starring Ravi Kapoor. Set in a prisoner of war camp during World War 2, the stakes are laid out very clearly at the beginning: 3 prisoners, a British Colonel, an American Lieutenant, and an Indian Sepoy must perform [...]
Fringe Reviews: The Inventor, The Escort, The Photographer, Her Boyfriend, and His Girlfriend
THE INVENTOR, THE ESCORT, THE PHOTOGRAPHER, HER BOYFRIEND AND HIS GIRLFRIEND by Les Spindle Writer-director Matt Morillo’s sex-com seems a bit racier than network television—if that’s possible. This loosely connected double bill is set in a New York apartment building during a fierce snowstorm. In a tale of a wealthy sex-aid-device inventor, Jeffrey (Jaret Sacrey) [...]
Fringe Reviews: Tape
TAPE Les Spindle Stephen Belber’s harrowing and literate psychological drama has lost none of its pertinence since its 2000 debut, largely because the questions it raises about guilt, responsibility, selfishness vs. selflessness, and the ways we choose to come to terms with recollections of our past—or mentally erase them—are issues that we grapple with throughout [...]
Fringe Reviews: Mission to Mate
MISSION TO MATE by Les Spindle Writer-director Colin Mitchell’s debuting play offers a three-part rumination on heterosexual mating rituals in L.A. The edgy encounters among separate couples are about as far from sitcom meet-cute as one can get. All segments feature a primarily mild-mannered male. The most striking female character is a ball-busting temptress, appearing [...]
Fringe Reviews: Pool (No Water)
POOL (NO WATER), by Mark Ravenhill, directed by Dave Barton. I can heartily recommend “Pool (No Water)” as performed by Monkey Wrench Collective as one of the most bracing, involving, and elating theater experiences I’ve had all year. Too many dance-based pieces are self-indulgent or random, but in this case director Dave Barton and choreographer Lee [...]
Fringe Reviews: Red Bastard
It’s true… Red Bastard is not your friend. As he struts around the stage like a chicken, body deformed with strange large lumps, he insults you, he humiliates you, and he provokes you. And you love him for it. The show itself asks the question, “Who the hell are you?” For many it’s a tough [...]
Fringe Reviews: Tape
TAPE, by Stephen Belber, directed by Elissa Weinzimmer. Without question the best production of this 2000 perennial I’ve ever seen, out of 4-5 of them including the 2001 movie. Belber’s theme, which I take to be the disjunction between our image of our past life (the one that runs on a “tape” in our mind) [...]
Fringe Reviews: Mission to Mate
MISSION TO MATE, written and directed by Colin Mitchell. These three lightly interconnected one acts, each an unlikely confrontation of male and female strangers, feature the cheeky writing one would expect of Bitter Lemons’ blogger-in-chief, though he also reveals a pleasantly sentimental streak he might disavow if pressed. First a woman demands her virginity back [...]
Fringe Reviews: Ghost Light
GHOST LIGHT, by Dan Spurgeon, directed by John B. McCormick. We haven’t had a really eerie local stage thriller since Ken Sawyer’s “Dracula” a couple years back and “The Woman in Black” before that. While The Visceral Company’s effort doesn’t have the same literary pedigree, its full blackouts, Ouija board surprises, thumps in the night, [...]
