Fringe: Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill!

In adapting Seijun Suzuki's surreal 1967 B-movie "yakuza noir" Branded to Kill, Patrick Harrison--who also directs and stars--has run with fundamental principle of Suzuki's: "There is no film grammar." This freedom from rules makes for a liberating show--and one becomes so immersed in the madcap presentation that it takes a while to realize that his company, Depth Charge, actually has a lot of structure behind their work. (It's almost disappointing to learn that this group has ties to Richard Foreman and John Zorn's Astronome.) The show is disturbingly erotic, too: Hanada (Harrison) has a boiled-rice fetish, and we see his wife, Mami (Alexandra Hellquist), tease him into violence with it; later, it will spill in slow motion out of the lips of his new lover, Misako (Margaret Odette Perkins). Don't dismiss this as pure imagery: when Mami mounts Hanada, wearing a butterfly mask and silhouetted in red light, the emotions are raw and very real. On a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being "Dis-u-grace-u-ful" and 5 being "The #1 killer," Butterfly, Butterfly, Kill Kill Kill! gets a 4.5.

[Read full review here]

Fringe: Love in the Time of Swine Flu

A title like Love in the Time of Swine Flu promises a series of themed, tightened skits. Instead, while the show has some recurring moments (an unfortunate series of parlor games a fiancee plays with his soon-to-be-parents-in-law), the ensemble Stupid Time Machine keeps it way too loose: it's obvious they've just thrown everything at the wall. On the plus side, one-note stuff (like new airport security measures that inevitably resemble grinding at a rave) remains mercifully brief; on the negative side, just as the show gets rolling (a vampire has performance anxiety and has to teethsturbate as his victim talks dirty about her veins), it cuts to something else. Jokes about making a Berenstain Bears porn (this may have beat them to the punch) repeat themselves too often to be funny.

[Read on]

Fringe: "A Matter of Choice"

Review: http://adaumbellesquest.com/2010/08/14/review-a-matter-of-choice/

The Fringe Fringedown

Over the course of the next two weeks of the Fringe Festival, we at the Show Showdown have invited a bunch of guest writers from the ITBA to share their coverage here, with us, as we attempt to cover more shows than ever before. The shows must go on, as many as possible: that's a lesson we learned from Patrick.

Our Town

Photo by Carol Rosegg

Our Town, currently playing at the Barrow Street Theater and starring Michael McKean as the Stage Manager, is a marvel of a play. Having somehow escaped high school without reading it or seeing it performed, I found this performance nothing short of fascinating.

The staging at the Barrow Street Theater is at once unique: along with a sparse stage set with only two kitchen tables and four chairs between them, the first row of seats on the left and right side of the stage are actually on the stage, in the middle of all the action. Actors and actresses not only use the chairs and people in them as props, but during certain intermediary segments of the show, audience members are discreetly slipped index cards and prompted to take part in a "Q&A" with the editor of the Grover's Corners newspaper.

The story is slow and steady, with a Stage Manager who maintains a certain sense of defensive placidity as he describes the people, places, and daily activities in this small New Hampshire town. The normality of the play captures the audience's attention so easily that it's not until the very end of the first act -- or even the beginning of the second -- that the viewer can really tell what the arc of the story is. This quaint, idealistic storyline is shattered in the third act, in a series of events that caused more than one audience member to gasp quietly. The final scene is heartwrenching; James McMenamin's portrayal of George Webb simmers so subtly throughout the first two acts that his final, agonizingly emotional scenes are breathtaking.

In The Heights

Photo by Joan Marcus

In The Heights is one of those rare shows that starts quickly and manages to keep its brisk pace throughout, without feeling rushed, or worse, lagging halfway through the second act while the cast catches its breath. The quick rhyming by Usnavi (currently played by Corbin Bleu) introduces the setting and all of the major characters before the show is even ten minutes old, yet the audience is never lost.

Rather, they are welcomed in by the community. Set in the Hispanic neighborhood of Washington Heights, around the 181st Street subway station, the show could easily become a cultural study that the audience watches but doesn't invest in. Instead, with a clever wink to such thinking, Usnavi lets the audience know that he knows what you're thinking -- "I'm up sh*t's creek, I ain't never been north of 96th Street!" Yet the audience is drawn in. The music, dancing, and complete joy that infuse the show are nothing short of infectious. In The Heights apeals to such a broad audience -- adults who can empathize with the day to day struggles, teens looking for a more relatable musical, and kids attracted by the wildly talented Corbin Bleu -- that it could easily paint its characters with broad strokes, but instead each is fully realized and wonderfully complex.

In The Heights deserves every one of its five Tony Awards. Bring your kids, bring your parents, bring the people down the street -- just make sure you see it, because no other show on Broadway captures summer in the city quite like this.