Fringe: The Princes of Persuasion

The Princes of Persuasion: Recipes for Romance makes for an oddly entertaining concert, not a satisfying work of theater. Ithai Benjamin's music is catchy, Rebeca Raney's lyrics are delightfully twisted (think Roald Dahl), and the automated puppets are novel and neatly designed. But the show is mostly prerecorded, and the puppets, not Benjamin, are the characters: airy and deranged Linda, sensible Destiny, boyish but occasionally demonic Lil' Bo-tique, and the goofy Domingo (whose eyes and nose face a different direction from his mouth). There's also no plot, no momentum: it's just a loose series of conversations that serve only to segue into one of the many songs. Still, although it can't compete with the far more complete Jollyship the Whiz-Bang and Avenue Q, it's whimsically winning enough to persuade Fringe audiences to love it.

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Fringe: Interfaith Understanding with Rev. Bill and Betty

A sendup of TV preachers, thinks I to myself. This must have something special, something to delight or at least surprise. No one would put together a show on such a hackneyed theme—would set out to lengthily mock the so-easily mocked—without a fresh approach, would they? Or at least some really sparkling creativity at the heart?

Alas. They would. The only hints of originality in this show came in a few of the fake local TV commercials shown on video between live segments of "Rev. Bill and Betty's" supposed cable access show. The two performers, Jen Ryan and Rik Sansone, are certainly stageworthy, and Ms. Ryan especially bites into her role with dastardly, pink-haired vigor. But their timing is all off, the best lines are thrown away out of context, and a lot of the jokes just don't make sense. (What Southern holy rollers would think to josh that "if there was survival of the fittest, how do you explain Larry King on television all these years?")

For humor to work it has to be rooted in something recognizably real. Martin D. Hill's script doesn't penetrate the innards of people like this to reveal what makes them tick. Rev. Bill and Betty's ignorant, twisted versions of the history of Judaism and Islam, which give the show its title, breathe a little life into the proceedings, but they don't last long. As a result the show is mostly bluster, artifically lightened with plays on words and bearing only intermittent, uncertain laughs.

Fringe: Faster than the Speed of White

Captain Northstar (Pushkar Sharma) and Ensign Southstar (Sathya Sridharan) are aboard the Brownstar Galactica, seeking out the Alcove of Answers, where they hope to at last answer this burning question: "Why did Shaq make Shaq-Fu?" Distracting lines like that only hold the spoken-word duo known as Brownstar back from their quest to find a place for the South Asian American actor. Sridharan, a loose physical comedian (he'd be great on Saturday Night Live), works better with the esoterically nerdy stuff than Sharma, who is stuck being the straight man (though he's funny as Van Wilder's Taj Mahal Badlandabad), but at least both are boldly going where few have gone before. If director Nick Choksi can cut down on all the dead space, and the two can tighten their search for identity around a more specific medium (e.g., Star Trek as opposed to all sci-fi), they'll have a much more arresting show.

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Fringe: Amsterdam Abortion Survivor

Dutch comic Micha Wertheim cleverly deconstructs the standard standup show—while putting on a hilarious standup show. He interrupts a story about childhood to lambaste the audience for an imagined slight. He asserts the unreality of our present experience in the theater. He uses his foreigner status to be somehow innocently yet blatantly politically incorrect. Through all this he milks observational riches, powerful comedy, and startling (if sometimes awkward) stage business via a skewed attack on jokes and solo performance. One thread throughout Wertheim's show is an exaggerated egotism. It fits his scruffy charm and he makes us snicker with, not at, his self-satisfied attitude. Ultimately he's satifying us with welcome laughter.

Fringe: Invader? I Hardly Know Her!

                       SEXY COWGIRL
Freeze!


                      ALIEN GIRL
Oh no you caught m--
Wait, what does a sexy cowgirl have to do with a
science fiction musical?


                     SEXY COWGIRL
It's sci-fi.


                     ALIEN GIRL
So?


                     SEXY COWGIRL
So what do you think was the gender of the guy who
wrote it?

                     ALIEN GIRL
Ah.

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Fringe: when last we flew

Tony Kushner is lucky to be getting such a touching homage to his masterpiece Angels in America in Harrison David Rivers's when last we flew. Rivers clearly loves the play and isn't trying to rewrite it. The play takes place in Kansas and there are no characters dying from AIDS or closeted Mormons. At a little under 2 hours, it's not the epic that Angels is. It does, however, remind us of the power of literature.

The central characters are two African-American high school students. Paul (Jon-Michael Reese) reads Angels in America obsessively. As he struggles with his sexuality and deals with the feelings of alienation brought on by his father leaving, he finds solace in the play as well as his bathroom--the only room in his house with a lock. Natalie (Rory Lipede--remember that name) is an exceptional student who gets kicked out of her private school when she realizes that she wants to stand up for injustice. Rivers uses imagery and lines from Angels in America to invoke a similar feeling of fantasy. My guess is that a knowledge of the play isn't required to be moved by when last we flew, but I wonder how someone unfamiliar with Angels would take scenes such as Natalie crash landing into Paul's bathroom.

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