Wacky, yes, funny, no: San Francisco's Please Leave the Bronx overstays their welcome.
Related Content
More About
I'LL ADMIT IT: I was dragging by the end of this year's Fringe Festival. Like the spring weather that alternated between windy rainstorms and idyllic sunshine, I found myself suffering from aesthetic whiplash between some great work and some truly awful dreck. It's one thing to hunker into a stoic position where you can numb yourself to the bad; but to be caught off-guard by something wonderful when you've given up hope is almost more than a critic can bear.
10th Annual Seattle Fringe Festival
March 9-19
The Fringe Festival is an odd barometer for the general state of Seattle's theater scene. Lots of sketch comedy was to be expected, given the amount of new sketch groups that have shown up in the last year or two. Likewise, the number of shows that were variations on either Shakespeare or literary classics—Alice in Wonderland scored a couple, along with several fairy-tale adaptations—demonstrates that, as always, Seattle artists are a literary bunch. What was surprising were the number of new plays written solidly in the realist tradition, as well as the number of pieces that were clearly workshops for later full productions. For those of us designated by accident or desire to try and see a lot of stuff, this was decidedly exhausting: Many more shows seemed to be 90 minutes or longer this year. Still, it's counterproductive to slight artists for presenting works-in-progress as part of the Festival; the Fringe has always been the place for folks to test-drive their pieces with an open and tolerant audience on board.
And that, as always, remains the greatest asset of the Festival: its audiences. Walking around Capitol Hill during the last couple of weeks has been a joy to a hardened old theater cynic like myself, as performers and spectators alike roamed the streets arguing about the quality of shows and creating a pleasing blur between the plays and the everyday street theater of Broadway. Complaints that the Festival is unjuried entirely miss the point: The jury is there every night, buying their tickets and applauding or withholding their applause at the end of each show. You don't need a panel of "theater professionals" (and that includes theater critics) to tell you that something has been worth seeing.
With that preamble, here are a few minireviews from the second week.
The Begetting—Local actor/playwright Jeff Berryman's intriguing prequel to the myth of King Arthur tells the story of Arthur's mother Igraine and the three men who compete for her love. It takes real moxie to toss an audience into 5th-century Britain with no more to guide them than the occasional narration of Emrys (Evan Whitfield), but Berryman's strong narrative sense, muscular poetic language, and a impassioned cast (led by Berryman himself as the brutish Uther and Nikki Visel-Whitfield as the desirous and extremely crafty Igraine) made this one of the most polished offerings of the Festival, despite the bare-bones production values. A full remount would be welcome indeed.
Foolery—Howard Stregack's "one-clown" show attempts to marry the books of the Bard with slapstick and circus tricks, but does so from an odd angle. Shakespeare's plays are filled with clowns and fools, so having Portia's three chests turned into a cup-and-balls magic routine or Macbeth's dagger speech performed with balloon animals seems like spray-painting the lily. There's precious little ore mined from some very rich material; the performer might hit the books a little harder before this project's next incarnation.
The Fisherman and His Soul—Oscar Wilde's enigmatic and dark fairy tale concerns a fisherman who falls in love with a mermaid and seeks to separate himself from his soul so that they can be together. Bradley Moss' adaptation, directed by Jennifer Kunz, uses a packing-trunk full of theatrical tricks, including puppets, masks, and choreographed movement, to duplicate Wilde's strange world where a stern Christianity lives side-by-side with pagan magic. The company's measured pacing and unconventional effects are not always successful, but the abundance of imaginative ideas and the willingness to stay true to the narrative of this odd fable yields some extraordinary images and moments, including a truly disturbing witches' Sabbath and a pleasing stories-within-a-story structure. Unexpected yet richly rewarding.
Please Leave the Bronx—Just in case you're worried that Seattle's missing out on some great comic talent, be assuaged by the uneven efforts of San Francisco's sketch comedy quintet Bronx Shmonx. The ensemble's high spirits fail to compensate for such sophomoric material as a booze-hound's guide to history or a painfully unfunny "Weekend Update" rip-off, though a love song to Godzilla and the narrated downfall of an unlikely beauty queen were amusing. Even given the tolerant tastes of their audience, this group scored only one laugh to every three groans.
The Drug War Follies—Jeffrey Stonehill's lecture against the insanities of the US government's costly "war on drugs" is good politics but only marginally theatre, with a table full of mostly unnecessary props hindering rather than helping his presentation. The best thing about this show, aside from Stonehill's scholarly knowledge of his subject, was his reassurance to his audience that the clock lying prominently on the floor would guarantee no more than 60 minutes to his presentation, a promise that he dutifully kept.
