Tag Archives: Cincinnati Fringe Festival

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

CFF17 logoThe 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_katesFirst 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 StoriesNext 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_bedI 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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CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 10

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

CFF_White PriviledgeFirst 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_8x10Also 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 RabbitFinally 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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CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 8

Heading into the home stretch, I’m seeing two new participant performance tonight.

CFF_Where There Were WoodsFrom Seattle, Samara Lerman offers WHERE THERE WERE WOODS:

What happens when your family lineage stops with you? What happens to the stories and memories of generations past? When the ghost of her grandmother starts visiting her at night, Samara is compelled to travel through interwoven family stories of survival. WHERE THERE WERE WOODS is a train-hopping, border-crossing story of danger, adventure, magic, loss, and the power of storytelling.

CFF_Wilderness SurvivalThen it’s Jimmy Grzelak from Philadelphia with WILDERNESS SURVIVAL:

Jimmy Grzelak is an Eagle Scout, spiritual voyager, and “winningly offbeat imagination” (Washington Post). Sometime in the early 2000s, somewhere in rural America, young Jimmy was initiated into the ways of a world ruled by adolescent boys. In 2017, older Jimmy woke up and realized that knowledge is now nationally relevant. He comes to Cincinnati to do his duty as a scout – to serve as your guide into the wild.

 

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CFF17: My Fringe Schedule: Day 7

Tonight is Two-fer Tuesday as I cross over into the two-show path.

CFF_Balls of YarnsFirst stop is BALLS OF YARNS, this year’s entry from the Troubadour of the Trailer Park, Paul Strickland:

Four-time Best of Fest Winner Paul Strickland’s new hilarious one-man musical adventure! David Lynch meets The Wizard of Oz. Songs! Yarns! Balls! In a strange town where creaky doors sing with you, libraries are separate from truth-braries, and extraordinary stories are shared through yarn and tin can, an ominous lurking evil has threatened to make things normal. NOT ON PAUL STRICKLAND’S WATCH. Jokes! More Yarns! Again, Balls!

CFF_Invisible GirlShow number two is INVISIBLE GIRL from ImagiNation Incorporated, a new local participant.

Sarah is the Invisible Girl; a fugitive who has taken residence in the bottom of the city sewer to avoid being bought and sold for currency in an alternate America. Her refuge, however, is short-lived as she is haunted by a series of specters that force her to confront her societal wounds. Loosely based on the Ralph Ellison novel, “Invisible Man,” Sarah’s invisibility is psychological rather than literal; a transformation through a series of vignettes.

After tonight, 19 shows down, 11 to go! Just keep fringe-ing.

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CFF17: IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Review

IS THAT ALL THERE IS? presented by Cincinnati LAB Theatre as part of the 2017 Cincinnati Fringe Festival. You can read the show description here

CFF_Is That All There Is“I have not plans to stop singing. What are you going to do when you love music? It’s a terrible disease. You can’t stop.” -Peggy Lee

Jaren Doren handles the role of Ronald/Rita well, but I think he could safely go bigger in personality without becoming a caricature. I would also encourage more stage drinking to better establish his issues with alcohol.

As Ronald’s sister Tess, Danielle Muething strikes a nice emotional balance between sibling and in a way, rival. Her relationship with childhood friend Chad also felt genuine and she handles his original song very well.

Sean Michael Flowers is fun as Chad, but he seemed more comfortable behind the piano. I thought his original song was a good fit for the show.

I did enjoy how the visit from his sister happened mid-transformation from Ronald to “Rita.” The half completed make-up added a surreal quality and really emphasized his/her facial expressions.

While I understand that the playwright was being purposefully vague, there were several instances where few more tidbits of information could have made the dialogue seem less repetitive. Overall though, a strong first effort from Sara Mackie.

Three performances remain through June 10.

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