Yearly Archives: 2017

June 10, 2017 · 9:41 am

CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 11/Sunday Fringe Encores

The final day of the 2017 Cincinnati Fringe Festival is upon us and you still have 28 shows to choose from today.

BUT THERE’S MORE! After today, you still have one last chance to catch the Pick of the Fringe Award Winners!

Votes for The Picks are due by 10pm tonight. Results will be tabulated and announced at tonight’s bar series around 11pm-ish (this event is free to the public). The Picks are:

Audience Pick of the Fringe
Audience Pick of FringeNext
Critics Pick of the Fringe
Artists Pick of the Fringe
Full Frontal Pick of the Fringe
Producers Pick of the Fringe

Any Pick Award winners available to perform will be given an encore performance on Sunday. The schedule and tickets for these performances will go on sale at www.cincyfringe.com tonight around midnight. The ONLY way to guarantee a seat is to purchase a $15 ticket. Five minutes before the performance, any remaining seats will be made available to fringe pass holders (voyeur, full frontal, media, artist, staff) on a first come, first serve basis.

Here are my final three shows:

CFF_kates First up is KATES, by local new participant Cait Robinson.

Accidentally given the same name, sisters Kate and Kate keep getting confused—until their power-hungry mother puts a stop to it by having one of them turned into a sheep. To find a cure, the two girls take to the sea, where they find redemption and romance come at a steep, Faustian price. KATES is a world premiere retelling of an Orkney Island fairytale about sisterhood, dark magic, and the seductive power of forgetting.

Written by Katharine Sherman and directed by Cait Robinson, the cast includes Tatum Hunter, Candice Handy, Taha Mandviwala, Bari Robinson, Ernaisja Curry & Kelsie Rae Slaugh.

CFF_Totally Untrue Stories Next it’s TOTALLY UNTRUE STORIES – TOTALLY UNLIKE ANY NOCTURNAL FLYING INSECT from new participant solo performance from Lepp Fabrications.

TOTALLY UNTRUE STORIES – TOTALLY UNLIKE ANY NOCTURNAL FLYING INSECT: I lie. I started telling stories at the West Virginia Liars’ Contest. You can see why I’m chagrined that the sort of storytelling sweeping the nation is all about the Truth. Who cares about the Truth? I mean, there’s a time and a place for Truth, but in storytelling? Storytelling is about Truths- eternal, ephemeral, spiritual, societal- but that doesn’t mean it has to be true.

CFF_bed I close out the Festival with Performance Gallery, the only participant who has performed in EVERY Cincinnati Fringe Festival. This year’s entry is BED (A FEVER DREAM):

Sex or sickness? Laziness or comfort? Messy or well made? What does “bed” mean to you? You were probably born in bed and might be destined to die there. If you are lucky, you will sleep in one tonight. Beds are a strange mixture of comfort, pleasure, vulnerability and pain. We live there in dreams or nightmares. Join us for this theatrical exploration in words and movement of this mysterious and intimate place – our bed.

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Tagged as Cait Robinson, Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Lepp Fabrications, The Performance Gallery

June 9, 2017 · 12:06 pm

CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 10

Three more shows (#25-27) on the agenda tonight.

CFF_White Priviledge First up is WHITE PRIVILEGE from new local participant Mad Prophet of Doom, starring Jim Hopkins and directed by Torie Wiggins:

WHITE PRIVILEGE tells the story of a middle-age white man and what it took to finally wake him from his privileged slumber. A hard humorous look at racial bias, and the uncomfortable conversation that White America needs to start having with itself.

CFF_8x10 Also a new participant, the Solitary Project out of Brooklyn, NY offers 8 x 10:

Imagine you’re locked inside an 8”x10” room for 23 hours a day. You’re allowed to exercise for one hour a day in a small chain-link cage. You haven’t touched another person in decades. You don’t know when you’re getting out. This is the reality of solitary confinement in the U.S. An intimate and harrowing experience, 8×10 tells the story of one man’s path to solitary, and illuminates his fight against the invisibility he experiences there.

CFF_Velveteen Rabbit Finally I am headed to VELVETEEN: OR HOW TO BE REAL, the third offering from Thought Plane Theatre of Manchester UK:

Welcome to our variety show of reality, where we guide you through the struggle of adulting and help you discover how to be real. Presenting our most successful candidate at becoming real, the Velveteen Rabbit, we will take you through the most difficult challenges of realness. A piece of interactive devised theatre, based on the children’s book, “The Velveteen Rabbit” by Margery Williams, we interrogate our obsession with the authentic self.

Previous entries by the duo include AND ALL THE REST IS JUNK MAIL (2013) and PREFER NOT TO SAY (2015).

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Tagged as Cincinnati Fringe Festival, Mad Prophet of Doom, Solitary Project, Thought Plane Theatre

June 8, 2017 · 2:48 pm

CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 9

Back to the three show track tonight. On the agenda are:

CFF_Romeo + Juliet + Anybodys From New York City, new participant The Functional Shoes brings their rock musical ROMEO + JULIET + ANYBODYS to Know Theatre.

She’s a loudmouth rascal with a wicked roundhouse kick. She puts the POW in Girl Power. And she could save those two dumb lovebirds—if somebody would just listen! Ladies and Gentlemen, the musical character you love to forget: Anybodys! Featuring original grunge folk music, this play will make you wanna laugh, squirm, dance, and burn the patriarchy to the ground.

CFF_Zelda and Haldey_1x1 Next it’s local new participant E Cubed Productions with ZELDA AND HADLEY: TOGETHER AT LAST,

ZELDA AND HADLEY: TOGETHER AT LAST – the entirely fictional, absolutely true story of what happens when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway’s wives have had enough of their husbands’ philandering ways and get even using a radio drama. To begin, the audience decides which literary masterpiece to tackle. The ladies then improve that story by playing all the characters, creating all the sound effects, and reminding the audience that “hell hath no fury…” Also, there’s gin.

Written and directed by Eileen Elizabeth Earnest, the cast features Elizabeth Chinn Molloy as Hadley Richardson & Alison Rampa as Zelda Fitzgerald.

CFF_vapers at the Gate Returning for their fifth Fringe appearance, local group Burying Beetles closes out my night with VAPERS AT THE GATE:

Three people: a survivalist, an artist and a Silicon Valley bro – hunted refugees blown out of their comfortable lives by a universal catastophe. Hopeless, exhausted, they meet a “coyote” – a guerilla fighter with fashion sense who will take them to the New World only if they expose their true selves through Native ritual and Hollywood trivia: Ultimate Vetting at the end of the world.

Written by John Ray and directed by Daniel Winters, the cast includes Mafer Del Real, Daniel Britt, Kearston Hawkins-Johnson, Olaf Eide, Gabriela Medina, Aiden Dalton, Zoe Cotzias & John Ray.

Shows 22-24 here I come…