After years of helping readers find their way through the far-flung maze of L.A. stages, I seldom feel an urgent need for my own guide to anything that’s happening on our theatrical turf.
Yet that’s what I felt when I first examined the Hollywood Fringe Festival offerings last week, trying to figure out what to see. I hadn’t realized that such a large proportion of the artists would be from out of town, completely unknown to me, or that many of them would be itinerant performers who apparently go from one non-curated festival to another. I was surprised that so few of the familiar names in L.A. theater would participate (two exceptions are Open Fist and needtheater).
OK, I told myself, it would be a great opportunity to see some previously unknown talents. I started sampling the shows more or less blindly, avoiding any artists whose work I had seen and any solo shows.
I know — great solo shows exist, and I’ve seen some of them. But an unknown solo show is likelier to be a self-indulgent, badly edited showcase than a similarly unknown production that requires more collaboration. Furthermore, if a show is bad, the experience is worse if you have to keep focusing on only one person. If the audience for a bad solo is so tiny that the one performer also keeps focusing on you, you’re in theatrical hell.
This no-solo-show criterion quickly eliminated a lot of the festival’s offerings from my might-see list. The festival publicist reports that about 65 or 70 solo efforts dot the approximately 160 performance-based shows (apparently an exact count would be difficult). Surely it’s easier, financially and logistically, to enter a solo show in a fringe festival than it is to assemble a larger group of people for such an event.
My other main consideration as I decided which Fringe shows to see? Time slots. It’s great to have the choice, however briefly, of plenty of show-time options in L.A.’s small theaters that don’t conform to the usual non-Fringe schedule of Fridays and Saturdays at 8, Sundays at 2 or 3, with occasional variations on Thursday or Sunday evenings.
At the Fringe, three shows were available at 3 pm on Tuesday, if you were so inclined. Three were offered at 10 pm on Monday, and one at 10 am on Thursday. According to the printed schedule, three shows will still be going up at midnight on Sunday, the final day of the festival.
I had been out of town for several weeks prior to the festival, so I had (and still have) some non-Fringe shows that I wanted to catch up with, before they close. I was able to do that last weekend - and still see six Fringe shows - by attending Fringe shows at some of the hours that wouldn’t compete with the more traditional schedules of the non-Fringe productions.
So was I a contented Fringe follower? Not entirely. The collaborative Fringe productions I saw weren’t great. On Monday, I broke one of my rules and saw a solo comedy show, but it also fell into the middling range. On Monday evening, I abandoned my guidelines and saw a solo play by an L.A. artist whose work was previously known to me. Only then did I get excited enough about a Fringe show to enthusiastically endorse it.
Anna Khaja in Shaheed
That show is Shaheed: the Dream and Death of Benazir Bhutto. Anna Khaja plays seven characters who knew the assassinated Pakistani leader - including some who were very critical of her, men as well as women - before playing Bhutto herself. It’s a revelatory performance, yet it feels like a real play, not a showcase. You can read an interview with Khaja here. The final performance is at the Open Fist at 2 p.m. Sunday.
One of the bigger-cast Fringe shows I saw, Pot! The Musical!, had a run at the Electric Lodge in Venice earlier this year. Maybe because of all that recent prep time, its Fringe appearance at ComedySportz demonstrates a level of professionalism that’s missing in some of the other efforts I saw. Yet the show has an odd buzz, so to speak - it’s a satirical musical that takes a very reasonable, mostly predictable, middle-of-the-road attitude toward marijuana. It lacks the acerbic edge that you might have expected from a Fringe entry. Just from seeing this show, you would never have known that California voters are being asked to legalize recreational use of marijuana in an election next November.
Deicide: a Sorta Musical tried to appear edgier than it is - and perhaps get a few more visitors - by including a “nudity” advisory in the Fringe program. Strangely enough for a Fringe festival, it was one of only three “nudity” advisories I spotted (there are a lot more “family friendly” and “flashing lights” advisories). Yet unless I blinked at the wrong moment, I saw no nudity in Deicide. A few scanty costumes, yes, but nothing that you couldn’t see at most of Southern California’s beaches. Maybe the show’s creators decided - after the deadline for the program description - that actual nudity might distract from their more self-conscious agenda. They depict - in a rather sophomoric sketch style - a future society that wavers between blind faith in a god and blind faith in science.
The producing company for Deicide is Murky Productions, which would have been a better name for the Moving Parts company, made up of recent UCSD grads, who are presenting Pagan Play at the Fringe. I like the specificity of the program description: “A Faun is searching for home. The forest is on lockdown. A Coven of witches needs to go grocery shopping…” etc., but it adds up to something that seems, well, murky - and more humorless than the description might indicate. Then again, maybe it wasn’t a great idea to see Pagan Play at 11 pm after seeing two other shows. I didn’t fall asleep, but I found my mind wandering in an attempt to prevent myself from falling asleep.
The next day, I noticed Pagan Play actors presenting excerpts from their oeuvre at the “Visibility Stages” on the Egyptian Arena courtyard. Unfortunately, it wasn’t all that easy to differentiate the Pagan Players from Hollywood Boulevard street people who start giving little speeches in public.
If you start attending the Fringe between now and when it closes on Sunday, you’ll have a lot more online opinions of particular productions to consult than I did when I started last Thursday. The LA Weekly and Backstage joined forces to review as many shows as possible on their web sites. The Fringe website itself includes reviews, some of which also appear at LATheatreReview.com. You can always find a few opinions at Bitter Lemons.
While it’s sometimes a good idea to tackle a new theater experience without anyone else’s disinterested opinions floating around in your brain, a large, non-curated fringe festival isn’t necessarily the best place to test that theory. For example, the description of a Fringe entry called T-O-T-A-L-L-Y! in the program guide is almost completely content-free, consisting only of the artist’s own rave opinions of her work (”a journey that is totally uplifting, totally heartbreaking and totally powerful!”). That description was enough to drive me totally in the opposite direction, but then I read and heard some recommendations of the show from other, less self-invested sources, so perhaps I’ll give it a chance this weekend.
On the other hand, I still have some non-Fringe shows on my list of must-sees this weekend. The show that most energized me, since returning from out of town, was Furious Theatre’s now-closed Boom. I also enjoyed The Clean House at the Odyssey (now playing through July 18). Both of these are happening far from the Hollywood Fringe (Pasadena and West L.A., respectively), but they point to the fact that L.A. is the home of vigorous theatrical activity just about any weekend, regardless of whether a festival is up and running.
I also want to salute Broad Stage, which has mounted a revised version of the new musical Daddy Long Legs, in conjunction with the show’s previous home, the Rubicon in Ventura. Last year I encouraged the Broad to look in our own area for shows that might be able to fill that 499-seat space, so I’m glad they did - and that the performance last Sunday evening drew an almost-capacity audience. The run continues through this weekend.
However, this two-actor romantic musical, set a century ago, doesn’t feel quite as right in the Broad as it did in the smaller Rubicon. It’s an intimate show. Most of it consists of letters between the two characters, without any direct interaction. The large, detailed set looks like overkill. The producers apparently have Broadway ambitions, judging from the ad campaign, but this is one show that might actually benefit best, aesthetically, from an even smaller theater - for example, one of those in the Hollywood Fringe.
For more information on the Hollywood Fringe and the productions within it, go to www.hollywoodfringe,org. or go to Fringe Central at 1625 N. Las Palmas, Hollywood (Theatre of Arts, formerly known as the Egyptian Arena Theatre). 866-811-4111.
Daddy Long Legs, Broad Stage, Santa Monica Blvd. at 11th and 12th Streets, Santa Monica. Thur-Fri, 7:30 p.m.; Sat, 2 and 7:30 pm; Sun, 2 pm. www.TheBroadStage.com. 310-434-3200.
