Voices of Ukraine

My expectations for Ancestral Voices were low. Dance is typically the riskiest of Fringe genres. The Festival prides itself on future Off-Broadway transfers playing alongside chintzy one-joke productions that will never again see the light of day. Serious dance companies wishing to disassociate themselves from a festival where fellow shows have titles like Sodomy & Pedicures or Rise Like a Penis from the Flames – A Phallic Phoenix Story are likely to skip the Fringe altogether for the slightly more prestigious New York Musical Theatre Festival in September. Indeed, just 11 shows of nearly 180 at this year’s Fringe fall under the genre of dance. This dearth is why it’s so exciting to report that Ancestral Voices is the festival’s second home run for dance. (The first was the Japanese hip-hop fusion of Orientarhythm.) Based on Ukrainian folk songs and poetry, the production is a consistently entertaining experience full of beautiful images. The serious nature of the production threatens to veer into bland ethnic presentation territory, but avoids this thanks to performer artistry, a quick-moving variety of scenes, and sincerity.

Several moments stand out as highlights. Erin Conway and Mark Tomasic perform a lovely courtship dance between a star and the moon. Tomasic later takes a solo in “The Fire of Kupalo,” a sequence full of enough tricks and passion to put to shame any of those angst-filled contemporary routines on So You Think You Can Dance. Other highlights include “Swim, Gentle Swan,” another gorgeous solo, performed by Catherine Meredith, and a full company number that wraps the stage in an intricate pattern of blue, yellow, and red ribbon. When the ribbons are gently pulled apart one by one after the dance, the effect is simple but striking.

Nadia Tarnawsky grounds the production as the onstage narrator spouting new age babble that probably would’ve sounded ridiculous coming out of someone else’s mouth. Indeed, the pre-recorded Ukrainian poetry that bookends most scenes, translated by Tarnawsky and performed by two voiceovers artists, does sound a little ridiculous. The reading of each poem lacks dynamics, making too much of it sound exactly the same. This is a disservice to the show’s otherwise excellent structure and choreography.

Not the Best Recipe

PB&J is a big tease. The concept is great. Two sisters in the remote Vermont mountains sell homemade peanut butter to eager consumers. However, their culinary creation has a sinister secret ingredient: pureed penis. The execution is not so great. The play makes every joke you expect it to, setting up a great premise and failing to do much with it. At an hour and forty minutes, the show needs more than just one good idea to sustain its running time. It doesn’t have them, although there's plenty half-baked notions and missed opportunities. Sisters Lillie and Millie are about to bolt their rural cottage for Canada when Dick Longfellow, a local radio announcer, shows up requesting an interview. Lillie is charmed by the presence of a celebrity, but Millie sees Dick’s extreme endowment at their last hurdle toward freedom. Will Dick escape with his dick intact?

The cast elevates the material, making the groaners fewer and farther between. David Gable as the unfortunate Dick Longfellow has the big creamy voice necessary for a radio announcer plus great comic timing. Lisa Riegel as Lillie and Amy L. Smith as Millie have a believable rapport as sisters, which is impressive because their relationship as written doesn’t make much sense. Mary Goggin and Juliet O’Brien round out the cast. Goggin plays Dick’s wisecracking producer while O’Brien seems like she’s having a grand time as the illegal immigrant sexpot who helps in the kitchen.

PB&J is most effective in its many monologues that break the fourth wall. Playwright Tara Dairman has a flair for direct storytelling. Just an actor, a simple spot and the audience. When the lights go back up and characters start interacting with each other, the fun drags. In group scenes, the same thing tends to happen over and over.

The momentum is further killed by the many set changes executed by an incredibly slow two-person crew. To be fair, there are many blocks to be moved onstage from one position to another, but there’s no excuse for sluggish switches. The dead space during the second half was so bad that laughter actually erupted through the audience when the crew came out to switch the set for the final time.

A Little Too Unusual

The Unusual Suspects is a murder mystery musical comedy about a group of clinically insane people having a party at a remote mansion. When one of their own is brutally killed, it’s up to two police investigators to discover who’s the culprit, if they can get past each guest’s wacky neuroses. The partygoers include an egomaniacal kleptomaniac, a sexy amnesiac, an irascible blind man, a mute piano player, a drag queen who doesn’t know he’s a man, and said drag queen’s gloved arm, which has a mind and voice of its own. The show tries to make itself as outlandish as possible, often to the point where it doesn’t make much sense. The story isn’t nearly as enjoyable as it should be. Rather than forming genuinely amusing situations and letting his characters play, writer Derek Sonderfan consistently distrusts his creations, piling on non sequitur after non sequitur until things become unfunny.

Then there’s the uncomfortable problem of the musical numbers. An energetic cast full of personality sings well throughout the show. Bryan Fenkart stands out as the ladies man of the party, and gets a great number called “Save the Monkeys” about halfway through. But the show doesn’t feel like a musical. When the first song happens some ten minutes in, it comes by surprise. The music isn’t memorable enough to warrant a full score. The sung sequences are not integral enough to the storyline. They’re more like amusing novelty bits stuck in for comic effect.

The show doesn’t even list its songs in the program. Also missing from the program is the fight choreographer. Whoever was behind what was surely one of the most awesome fights in Fringe Festival history deserves a shout out. Where’s the recognition? At least Jessica Parks gets credit for her scene design, which includes inflatable furniture.

The Unusual Suspects also takes far too long to end. There’s an intermission that isn’t particularly needed, and a title closing number at the end that feels tacked on. The Rashomon-like recounting of what happened from each character’s perspective becomes repetitive. Problems aside, the show is a lot of fun. It’s just a shame that the acting and creating talent wasn’t focused on a piece trying so hard to be quirky that it collapses in on itself.

The Monkey Goes Moo

The Monkey Moo has many things going for it. It features some intricate puppetry work, an equally expressive human lead, and a fantastic musical score. Whether these elements combine into a cohesive, affecting experience is another matter. Only after reading the plot summary at the bottom of the first page of the program do story intricacies reveal themselves. Details are lost in the experience itself, leading this nearly wordless piece to become more of an abstract diversion than the heart-pounding adventure tale promised by the description. As a result, it’s entertaining to watch but doesn’t leave much of an impression the next day. Moo is a mischievous monkey in 1920s Shanghai. Forced into vaudeville because of financial woes, he meets a beautiful girl who works at the local teahouse and falls in love. Things go wrong when the girl’s pimp discovers their relationship. An epic battle ensues.

The show sports some exciting production elements in its threadbare set. Taking the house made of string conceit of recent Off-Broadway hit Eurydice one step further, the entire set is made of a long rope. The rope morphs into various shapes that suggest locations and objects. The effect is quite remarkable, particularly in a scene where Moo runs through the streets looking for his love.

Yoko Myoi as Moo is a gifted physical comedian with a huge face that perfectly suits her character. The other two onstage performers are the puppeteers Andrei Drooz and Karen Elizaga, who navigate the stage on tiny moving stools. No detail is left unconsidered. Drooz and Elizaga’s real hands extrude just far enough out of their robes to create their tiny puppet’s appendages. When the pimp puppet drinks, he flails about the stage, every limb wildly out of control. The puppeteers blend seamlessly with Myoi. The climatic human vs. puppet fight is probably the production’s most exciting moment.

Zelda Pinwheel, a “melodic noise trio” from New Jersey and Philadelphia, accompanies the action. Group members James Dellatacoma, Ralph Gould, and Stephen Quaranta play a huge variety of instruments, real and electronic, to augment proceedings. Their score is at once sparse and sad, and in another moment throbbing, tribal, and unpredictable. Their work helps the production to become, if not a full success, then at least one which tickles the audience’s senses.

Cut It/Cure It

The Our Lady of Pompeii Church’s Demo Hall is the fringiest of Fringe venues. Sunlight streams in from long neglected gray windows, icicle lights and fake ivy from some long abandoned post-service reception droop gloomily across the room, vending machines hum in the corner, and the seats are all on one level. It makes sense that the hall is home to Cancer! The Musical, the kind of boldly titled but low on quality show audiences have come to expect from the festival. The surprise is that, against all odds, Cancer! is actually pretty good. Who’d have guessed it?

Our story begins with a sextet of rats in a testing lab, each hoping that they’ll be the one to nobly die and cure cancer. One rodent gets his wish. The lucky scientist behind the discovery is Dr. Bernard Bernard, who hopes his awesome innovation will finally get him laid. However, it isn’t long before sinister insurance and pharmaceutical corporations are hunting for Bernard, forcing him to go into hiding.

The show does a nice job of combining its many slapstick gags and bad puns with the serious side of its title disease. The balance is impressive, and helped greatly by Topher Owen as Dr. Harris and Inga Wilson as Annie, the play’s young lovers. Dr. Harris is the show’s emotional core, but Owen is equally adept at physical comedy. Owen and Dustin Gardner as Dr. Bernard have a fantastic number halfway through the first act called “Cut It/Cure It” that’s worth the $15 alone. The remaining actors also drive the script forward with their energy and commitment. The most exciting numbers are the ones where everyone is onstage.

Despite being a lot of fun and having varying musical styles, it seems like the Fringe is the show’s current final destination. Work needs to be done if this wants to become a full-fledged evening out.

Strengthening the book would be the place to start. The show has an unnecessary intermission that kills momentum. Too much time is spent with Mr. Murphy, a mildly amusing side character. Sometimes scenes go on for too long. In particular, an extended early exchange between the show’s two female characters created a murmur in the audience over whether someone had missed an entrance. With these and similar improvements, the show has a shot at the mainstream.

Game Over

Helmet is a play composed of two incongruous parts. The first half is intense physical theater at its finest, but has a mostly unintelligible storyline. The second half features a terrific monologue and some interesting interaction between the two characters, but it loses the corporal specificity of the first section. If the two halves were properly combined, they would create a highly compelling experience. As it stands now, Helmet is an intriguing but ultimately frustrating hour in the dark. Sal is a video game storeowner facing bankruptcy and living in the shadow of his more successful brother. Despite Sal’s financial and personal troubles, teenage gamer Roddy thinks he has a dream job. Roddy (aka Helmet) comes into Sal’s store every day to talk shop and buy the latest diversion. As the lines between game and reality blur, will either be able to survive the store’s imminent closure?

Playwright Douglas Maxwell, who formerly worked at a video game shop in Glasgow, shows his gaming knowledge in his dialogue. His play is peppered with terminology that might confuse audiences who grew up with the original Nintendo, an Atari, or nothing at all.

As Sal laments in one scene, his industry is so obsessed with the next best thing that three years ago is an unthinkable eternity for most gamers and manufacturers. Sal asks why graphics need to be continually improved to please consumers. A good game is a good game, no matter how old it is. Observations like this are more likely to hit home for players who follow the industry.

Maxwell repeats many of the scenes in his play as if each character had multiple lives, as do the characters in typical video games. The idea is cool, but it clouds his intent. Is Maxwell’s point that given the ability to relive moments in their own lives people might choose to make things easier for themselves rather than facing the grim nature of reality? This seems to be what the play is trying to communicate, but it is difficult to know for certain.

Both Michael Evans Lopez as Sal and Troy David Mercier as Roddy/Helmet fully commit to their Viewpoints grid physical score in the tiny Players Loft space. With the limited rehearsal time generally available for Fringe productions, it’s great to see two actors genuinely working together. Now if only the two sections of the play could do the same.

A Dismal Camp Fairytale

Princess Mimi, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Frog is further subtitled (A Play for Someone Else’s Children). If someone else’s children are little monsters, the nightmare of every babysitter in town, and long overdue for a good talking to, then by all means take them to see this play. Those kids deserve to suffer through this bottom of the barrel melding of The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast. Anyone else should stay far, far away. The title princess is a spoiled brat whose only companion is a golden iPod nicknamed Poddy. When she drops her beloved device in a well, she strikes a deal with a frog to fish it out in exchange for letting him stay at the palace. What follows is exactly what you’d expect.

The show, judging from the bios in the program, is almost entirely a product of NYU Tisch BFAs, both in front of and behind the scenes. The humor is low-rent college irony. Scraps of it could be amusing if cut into an Internet series of 45-second fragments, but no amount of bright scenery or energetic acting can disguise the fact that most of playwright Patrick Flynn’s script just isn’t funny. It’s too safe to be kitsch, too bland to be camp, and too often adult to be children’s theater. Society is past the point where merely dressing a man or woman in drag and having them walk around in fabulous outfits is worthy of laughs.

The fabulous outfits, however, really are just that. Everyone gets some great costume choices from designer Laura Helmer. Most characters sport a ridiculously oversized hat for comic effect. Princess Mimi’s headdress contains empty Tab cans that bang together when she makes any sudden movements. Scenic designers Andrew Scoville and Harry John Shephard find charming and simple ways to create the magical land of New Jersey, where the story is set.

But nearly everything else is off. Throughout the show, the two narrators constantly ask the Princess (in the kind of meta-theater talk only recent drama school graduates find amusing) to move the scene along for the sake of the audience. It’s as if the storytellers themselves know they’re telling a dud.

JTT at the Fringe

The plot summary on the Fringe website for A Mivkah is completely different from the plot summary on the back of the show’s postcard. Neither come very close to describing the show, which is like a bad Robert Altman film. There’s so much overlapping dialogue that it’s impossible to tell what’s happening. Combine that with the fact that one actress plays the mother of all three unrelated main male characters without any type of costume or vocal change, and you’ve got a mighty confusing hour in the dark. Max Jenkins plays Jonathan Taylor Thomas of Home Improvement and Lion King fame. Now a washed up child star at 25, JTT (as the girls used to call him) is desperately looking for a comeback. He finds his calling in the world of confessional solo performance, using his despondent friend Alan to test his new material. Alan has problems of his own. He talks to the ghost of his dead grandmother Nana and the ghost of his dead childhood love Ben.

All the characters walk with unclear purpose in carefully choreographed patterns across the stage. Some dialogue occurs when actors are backstage behind the curtains. More often, dialogue happens on top of the rolls of old carpet and wooden doors that make up the set. At one point, Jessica Arnold as Nana delivers a monologue from atop the door as another actor with his back to the audience moves the platform for obscure dramatic effect.

The whole production feels like a bad experimental show you did in college, the type of thing where you went out more for the party and the alcohol afterward than for the actual show itself. This is a shame because over the hill child stars are a hot topic in American culture right now. They demand a good play, but this certainly isn’t it.

The overall aesthetic is aided by some excellent original music created by Chris Moscato. Cellist Christine de Frece and violinist Danielle Turano add dramatic tension to the muddle of a story. They also laugh at all the jokes from their miniature orchestra pit, creating a far more enjoyable impression than anything else onstage.

A Chase Too Brief

The postcard, program, and other promotional materials for Chaser all declare in serious-looking font that the play contains, “Male nudity and scenes of a sexual nature.” At least it's obvious that they know what they’re selling. The show is a rote examination of bug chasing, the troubling trend of gay men actively seeking HIV virus infection. Playwright Howard Walters wisely leaves politics at the door, but the even-handed approach means his play has nowhere to go once the initial concept is revealed. Eventually, Chaser just turns into a shouting match. The first date between Dominick, a tightly wound fashion consultant, and Val, a charming out of work actor, has gone well enough that the pair has ended up in Dominick’s apartment. Dominick doesn’t believe a guy as cute as Val would ever go for him, but he eventually succumbs to Val’s irresistible smile, leading the rest of their night into dangerous territory.

Jake Alexander as Dominick and Wil Petre as Val have great chemistry together, so much so that their onstage encounter feels less like a first date and more like a third or fourth date. The two make all kinds of wild judgments about one another when they barely know each other, so nothing they say is particularly effective. The audience never gets to see these characters before they decide to sleep together. Walters would do well to add some exposition at the beginning, allowing viewers to get to know these men better.

As such, the experience is all set-up and mostly no payoff. Audiences aren’t stupid. When they go see Chaser , whose logo is creepily made of various kinds of bugs, they know what the title means and what’s going to happen. Once the play's secret is disclosed, it doesn't explore new topics or deepen the understanding between these two men. It just sits there. As for the promised “male nudity and scenes of a sexual nature,” these are there, but certainly not the guilty pleasure main attraction for peeping tom audiences.

The show, which runs a brisk 55 minutes, ends so suddenly that there was a slight hesitation in the audience as the lights went down over whether or not clapping should begin. Both Dominick and Val are interesting characters played by good actors. Walters should trust his audience to go with them beyond mere surface level.

Put Another Beer on the Fire

How can half-siblings mourn the passing of their father when neither one liked him much? By drinking a lot of beer and hashing up old family history. This is the basic plot of bombs in your mouth , the type of intimate unit set two-hander tailor made for tinier Fringe venues. Despite a familiar concept, this one-act mines fresh emotions thanks to great acting and concise storytelling. Playwright, Rude Mechanicals member, and star Corey Patrick plays Danny, a Minnesota gas station owner caring for his abusive father. Danny hasn’t seen half-sister Lily, an Upper West Side copywriter, in over five years. When she returns for the funeral, their respective frustrations are encapsulated in a silent, animalistic impromptu drinking game. The bingeing establishes an authentic bond between the pair, who genuinely seem like they’ve been pushing each other’s buttons since childhood.

The play finds absurdity in the way people talk when pushed to their limits. Both characters find their behavior growing increasingly irrational, mirroring the demise of their parent. While much of the action is confrontational, there are some tender moments as well to balance out the relationship. There is a very sweet moment about a third of the way through where Lily discovers that Danny has fixed up his bedroom for her. From that instant, his gesture and her gratitude hook you for the rest of the show.

Patrick’s script is chock full of tiny inanities of everyday life, but never dips into shoddy hipster irony. Lily refuses to accept a bereavement phone call from a old friend whose house recently burned down, saying the two will console each other over their losses to the point of extreme awkwardness. Danny discusses the difficulty of eating everything with a spoon when their dad outlawed all forks in the house. Both ponder the wonders of Jello.

The show’s provocative title is the only misleading or disappointing thing about the production. It makes it sound like just another Fringe show with a clever moniker but, otherwise, no real value. There are no bombs here, just honest communication between an actor and an actress, a half-brother and a half-sister, and a playwright and an audience. That’s a far bigger rarity.

Fly Away Home

The opening night performance of children’s musical Angela’s Flying Bed began with an audience member rushing from his seat into the wings to loudly answer his cell phone as the lights went down, leaving his poor daughter sitting alone in the dark. The beginning of the show itself features neglected little Angela, whose two parents are so busy talking on cell phones that they never spend any quality time with her. If that’s not life imitating art (or the other way around), then what is? Locked up at home without a babysitter and no one to play with, little Angela must rely on her imagination to pass the time. She invents a flying, saucy bed that takes her to magical lands with charming creatures: a beach with a trio of selfish shellfish, a desert with a family of camels, and a mountain where llamas wear pajamas. In Angela’s mind, each of these wisecracking animals sings a similar cut time, upbeat number to entertain her. Can Angela eventually get her parents to do the same?

Angela’s Flying Bed is a charming idea poorly executed. Problems are apparent from the opening number, where the complicated patter structure evades young Maya Gaston, who plays the title character. While critiquing child performers is a precarious situation at best, there’s no denying that Gaston looks unhappy onstage throughout, particularly during her ballad “Again.” No one wants to watch a sad looking youngster. In the show’s penultimate and best number, personality-filled Luke Marcus, the show’s other child actor, blatantly outshines his female co-star. The minor-to-minor face-off creates an awkward tension onstage.

Book writer Karl Greenberg and composer Dave Hall should give Mel Brooks a call. Their show is peppered with the kind of vaudeville word shtick that would have made them a fortune 75 years ago. A huge majority of the show rhymes in an amusing way that never feels forced. Unfortunately, the production lacks the energy and the drive necessary for these puns to be consistently funny. Most just fall by the wayside. The adult character actors try their best to ham up the material, but the results are mixed, and the ending is anticlimactic at best.