RobotMan

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The outdoor entertainment tent at this year’s Fringe Festival rocked. Jessica Pawli organized all the bands and she brought in some amazing talent. There were times when I was between shows and I just had to stop, listen, sketch and enjoy. RobotMan had a fun jazzy sound with plenty of energy. Frankie Messina was sitting in the front row and I asked him how long the group had been playing. He said, “Probably not much longer, but I’m glad I am here to catch them”.

I always agonize that I might not have enough time to do a sketch, but I jumped right in anyway. The fast paced music slipper notes helped carry me along. Sometimes faster is better and accuracy can be replaced with spontaneity. The music reflected that thought as did the sketch. What a fun surprise to catch RobotMan in action on the lawn of fabulousness.

Under the Rainbow

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Under the Rainbow written and composed by Alen Gerber was the one operatic performance at this year’s Fringe. The show began with a young mother holding her infant son in a rainbow colored blanket. Crystal Lizardo, who played the mother was surprisingly petite yet her voice filled the huge Rep Theater. She sang a beautiful song in which she imagined her son’s bright future.

Years later, her son is a grown man and he leads a human rights march for marriage equality. A church group lead by the minister of the mother’s church is out to appose the march.  When tempers flair, a member of the human rights group is shoved to the ground. Sarah Purser played Grace, the injured activist and when the minister, Ricardo Dominguez, offers to help her, they sing together about what message, or lack thereof, the bible offers on gay life.

The mother conducts a chorus in church and then laments her son’s sexuality. Being religious, she wants to protect her son from sure hell-fire, but she also wants to see her son to find happiness here on earth. Whereas most parents never accept a child’s homosexuality, she finds solace in a hymns verse, “Where there is charity and love, God is there.” In the end, she accepts her son as he is, and they embrace.

I went into the show with no preconceptions and was pleasantly surprised. The woodwind player unfortunately didn’t check his reeds and thus he kept missing notes. The music as a whole was beautiful but not particularly memorable.  The main musical theme of the show was the exact chromatic inversion of the melody of Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow“. The shows message of open minded acceptance transcended any technical issues. There was a well deserved standing ovation.

Bless Me Father For I Have Danced

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Bless Me Father For I Have Danced was presented by Yow Dance at this years Fringe festival. This was a blockbuster show that had a cast of over 30. The show presented amazing song and dance numbers form some of Broadway’s best musicals. The show was tied together by a storyline about a young boy who desperately wanted to audition for a show, but his religious parents refused to let him follow his dream. When the boy goes to church and talks to the priest he still is as enthusiastic as ever and the song and dance numbers are used as evidence to present his case.

A sassy and sexy Bob Fosse dance number honestly swings the balance and the priest sees the boy’s point to comic effect. The boy’s parents aren’t as easy to swayed until a secret is uncovered. The boy’s mom was once a dancer and she gave up show business when she became a mom. As strict as the father was, he also ends up doing a song and dance. A couple of singers voices didn’t hold up in the cavernous Orange venue, but as a whole the show had legs. There were dancing angels, patriotic sailors and bespangled female dancers and show stopping numbers from so many shows so that you definitely get your monies worth.

Word of mouth spread fast and there were incredible lines to get into this show often winding out the Shakespeare Theater door leaving people lined up outside in the heat. No single green room  could hold this huge cast and one day I saw them all behind the Shakespeare theater doing makeup and costuming in the tent set up for a piano near the beer vendor. Of course I couldn’t catch the whole cast dancing, so I focused on the boy and surrounded him by dancers in a cross shaped pattern with a Sexy dancer at the base of the cross. This was without a doubt the biggest production at this years’ Fringe and everyone wanted to see it. This was an ambitions show for Yow dance and the entire crew that payed off. If you didn’t go, you missed a hell of a show.

Tappin’ and Yappin’

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International superstar Cindy Starr took the Fringe audience on a whirlwind journey through her career in stage, film, TV, and more. The show featured stories, songs, and more from America’s beloved Tap Dance Queen. From her humble beginnings in Chicago to the triumph on the Silver Screen, Cindy and her accompanist, Johnnie Ivories, had the audience laughing and singing along with her best known hits.

John B. deHaas who plays Johnnie Ivories came up with the idea for the show. He was fascinated by tap legend Ann Miller and her larger than life persona. He knew Joy Anderson since 1999 and decided she would be perfect to play Cindy Starr. Johnnie Ivories seemed based on Liberace with his golden suit studded with sequins.

Cindy kept the jokes coming. An ongoing theme seemed to be that she was always pursuing men who had no interest in women. Several times she had audience members get on stage with her so she could teach them some steps. The results were hilarious. Andrea Canny directed the show, and at one point, she gave gummy bears to everyone in the audience. The pre-show announcements by Michael Marinaccio and George Fringe Wallace always ended with, “if you have any candy, Unwrap it Now!” It therefor became quite comical as Andrea struggled to open the large bags of candy in the back of the theater.

The show was fun and entertaining. As promised, there was plenty of tappin’ and yappin’ along with a couple of Swedish guests who mixed it up on stage.

The Secret

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Martin Dockery from Brooklyn, New York is a consummate story teller. When asked what he does, he doesn’t like to say ” storyteller” because it brings up the assumption that he tells stories to children. His stories are very adult themed. His delivery is energetic to the point of being maniacal. He sort of reminds me of the character Dennis Hopper played in Apocalypse Now,  with a touch of Kramer from the Jerry Seinfeld show. As the audience filed in, Martin sat on stage left talking to people in the front row. He explained to everyone that when the show starts, the lights would go dark and he would be standing just off stage, he would walk on stage in the dark and sit down. Only then would he bathed in light. The fourth wall was broken, artifice stripped away. It was just him telling us his story.

Martin’s Fringe show told an incredible story that showed how strange and disconnected his family could be.  About this same time Martin and his girlfriend were going through a rough patch. Martin wants a child but she wasn’t ready. In his mind, she might just not be ready to have his child. They weren’t married, he doesn’t believe in the institution so there wasn’t really any commitment. If either of them met someone else, that would be cool, at least in theory.

So anyway, Martin’s father had moved to Vietnam, a country where he had once gone to fight a war. Martin decided that a vacation with his girlfriend might smooth over their differences. His father had a secret and he let Martin know that he would tell all when they got to Vietnam. Now Martin’s brother knew the secret so they had a long drawn out conversation full of trivial small talk before Martin got to the truth. His father had married a Vietnamese girl and together they had conceived twins. Martin had a younger brother and sister he had never met. Meeting his siblings was magic. He played imaginary games with them and a bond was set in place that could never be broken. His father was impatient and argumentative and watching him deal with two small children brought back all the memories of his own childhood. He had to forgive his dad for his unchangeable faults.

Martin and his girlfriend were exploring Vietnam as tourists and they decided to heighten the experience by dropping acid. Martin became a super tourist seeing the way the sky ignited with vibrant color. He became obsessed with shooting photos of a palm tree. He explored it by shooting pictures of it from every angle. He imagined that National Geographic would marvel at the series and create a coffee table book that would be a best seller. Martin had lost track of his girlfriend. She had wandered off. He searched for her but found a native boy that he photographed obsessively.

When Martin did find his girlfriend, she was in tears. She felt that he didn’t love her the way she used to. She had found someone else, a successful theater producer.  Looking back at his photos, he realized she was in many of the shots of the palm tree. In each successive shot, she grew smaller until she became pixelated and disappeared. While one door in his heart opened, another closed.

True West

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The Dark Side of Saturn Productions is presenting Sam Shepard‘s True West at the Orlando Shakespeare Center. I was surprised by the intricate set by Tom Mangieri. I had just been in the Mandell Theater multiple times at Fringe and got used to seeing a bare stage. Fringe just ended two days ago, so this set was created incredibly fast. This was the first time the actors got to move around in the actual space. Director Kevin Becker was in the audience seating while Chaz Krivan who plays Austin, and Cory Volence who plays Lee sat at the breakfast nook table on stage.  Lighting levels were being adjusted, so the actors got to relax for a bit.

After all the lights were adjusted, Bill Warriner, the fight director, put the actors through the paces as they fought in the kitchen. The fight began with Austin breaking a beer bottle over Lee’s head. He then slammed Lee into the counter. As Lee lay on the floor recovering, Austin grabbed an electrical chord and wrapped it around Lee’s throat. Now, this was a rehearsal, and the action was supposed to be at 1/4 speed. The safe word for Cory was “Hold”. He called out to stop the action several times. He stopped the action when he was slammed into the refrigerator, because he was concerned it might topple over. He was concerned that Chaz was getting too aggressive. In a staged fight, both actors need to feel they are in control of the action. In the heat of the moment, the fight accelerated. There was a long moment where Austin was chocking Lee. Lee’s face was beet red as he struggled. Was he struggling to say the safe word? Was this acting, or had the fight crossed over the fourth wall? Austin said, “I could easily kill him, all I have to do is twist.” Lee’s eyes bulged in his head before he fell limp to the floor.

After the fight rehearsal, there was a full run through of the play. Tara Rewis picked up the broken glass and other refuge had to be cleaned up before the play could begin.  Dorothy Massey who did costuming, had to help Cory figure out how to use his belt. “This is why I get paid the big bucks!” she joked.

The play is about two brothers, Austin and Lee. 
Austin was writing a screenplay while he watched his mother’s home. She
was on vacation in Alaska. Lee,who is the black sheep of the family,
showed up wanting to drink beer, borrow Austin’s car and in general cause mischief. He had a knack for bullying, scheming or stealing anything that he wants. Arguments erupted
but, despite their differences, these brothers did care about each other, or they would do just about anything to steal each others lives. When Hollywood agent, Saul, played by Jim Cundiff comes to the home to check the progress on Austin’s screenplay, Lee schemed his way into convincing Saul that his true life experiences in the desert would make for a great screenplay. The brothers collaborated on writing the script outline but the writing sessions never went smoothly. When the mom, played by Barbara Blake, returned home, she found the house a mess. Her crowning moment came when she grabbed a bottle of rum off the table to spare it when the brother’s brawled.

This was a powerful drama that dives deep to explore the relationship between brothers who are polar opposites, yet united by a dark past. If you are missing the mad rush of Fringe, then head to the Shakes to see True West. Nothing beats a hangover like a nice cold beer. Don’t miss it!

The Mandell Theater
Orlando Shakespeare Center

812 E Rollins St, Orlando, FL

May 31 at 8PM
June 2, 6, 7, 8 at 8PM  

Tickets are:

$16 in Advance
$20 at Door
$15 at the Door with a Fringe Button

Jem Rolls Off the Tongue

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This is Jem Rolls 93rd Fringe Festival. He hails from Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. He worked the Fringe lines hard here in Orlando pointing out to anyone who would listen that the flier’s back had an austere simplicity. It was blank. The show offered a solid hour of poetry, at times funny and at times mystifying. This wasn’t a performance that gave any linear narrative. His subjects were all over the map. His energy and enthusiasm are contagious.

One rather funny poem was titled, “We split up because the sex was too good.” He claims to be working on the sequel which will be, “We stayed together hoping the sex would get better.” In one poem he personified words that resisted his every attempt to wrangle them into a poem. He grimaced and leaned towards the audience to show how determined, selfish and difficult words can be. He recited a poem about how the British always win. “We won! We Won, Wewonwewon, we Won!” He blamed the American Revolution on the fact that Germans were doing the fighting not the British.

The poems came out so fast and furious that at times I didn’t know how to react. Bikini Katie sat across from me. Craig’s Lust had purchased ad space on her bare mid drift. Fried cheese curds had an ad on her right thigh and I believe Ship Happens had prime ad space above her cleavage. I could only squeeze a small bit of Lust into the sketch.

Reincarnation Soup

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Viet Nguyen performed all the parts in this Fringe show that a story about a family’s hardships and suffering. He hobbled onto the stage as an old man who sat silently watching a sunset. At the Fringe preview, he had performed a heart warming story about how he met an incredible girl while singing at a Vietnamese karaoke bar. Being American, he couldn’t keep up with the lyrics. The girl however filled him with confidence. Afterwards he imagined how wonderful it might be to be a tree  standing eternal vigil beside her home.

That heart warming scene was still part of the production, but it was a faint glimmer of hope among a cast of hardships. There were rapes at sea, arguments in a jail cell and a childhood game with a water pistol. Viet played so many characters, both men and women, young and old, that I lost track of who was who. With so many experiences spliced together, I wasn’t sure who I should care about. Viet’s performance was amazing but Reincarnation Soup as a whole unfortunately left me cold and indifferent.  The play ended with the old man returning to watch the sun set. I wasn’t sure if it was his experiences that I had just witnessed.

Sacco and Vanzetti

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Between shows at the Fringe Festival, I would stop on the green lawn in Lockhaven Park for a bite and a drink. The outdoor tent this year was alive with incredible acts all the time. Jessica Pauli was asked to take charge of the programing and she brought in a constant stream of talented musicians. I could have spent the entire week out there sketching the performances from some of Orlando’s best musicians. Kaleigh Baker came all the way from Portland Oregon to perform.

Sacco and Vanzetti was performing the last of their set when I sat down to do this sketch. Several of the musicians children took an interest in what I was doing and they watched every line and wash go down before they started a game of tag. I believe I sketched this group once before at an outdoor festival on Sand Lake Road. The music was lively and fun, but I was sketching so fast, I was in panic mode the whole time.  I also needed to finish before getting to the next show.

The green lawn of fabulousness was a constant party thanks to all the amazing talent that performed on the outdoor stage. I’m betting that beer and alcohol sales must have went through the roof this year at Fringe. I stuck to caffeine for my fix.

Marathon

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TJ Dawe from Vancouver, Canada presented this incredible one man Fringe show about recognizing your own blind spot and trying to address it. When the lights came up, TJ was on stage acting like he was running in slow motion. He joked that it was impossible to do that and look graceful. His show addressed the idea that people fit neatly into 3 distinct instinct types.

The first is the self preservation instinct. These are the people who are ready for anything. They plan ahead, bringing water along on a hot day or a sweater in case the air conditioning gets pumped up too high. When they pack for a vacation they bring pretty much everything in their closet, just in case. Hotels are booked ahead of time and even restaurants are reserved weeks in advance.

The second is the sexual preservation instinct. This doesn’t just mean they are sexual, it also means they are obsessed with the creative process. They love the uncertainty of beginning a creative endeavor and they are risk takers, living on the fringe.  This creative process might have seemed like a fun playful idea 9 months ago but there are pains and uncertainty as the project nears completion. Then it is released into the world, beautiful and imperfect. These people are individualists they don’t show off by writing a status on Facebook, but instead share their ideas on a more personal platform like a blog. The more TJ talked about the sexual preservation instinct, the more I felt like he was talking about me.

The third the social preservation instinct. People who have this instinct are energized by small talk at parties. They love gossip and knowing what is going on with everyone around them, even celebrities. This instinct can be a blind spot for someone with the sexual preservation instinct. Being creative, they don’t have time for empty conversations. However beneath this facade of superiority is irritation and shame. They want to feel like a part of the group but they are always an outsider, looking in. When the creative person breaks through that social barrier and actually enjoys meeting people at a bar or on the green lawn of fabulousness, they want to feel rewarded. There should be an 80’s movie montage that shows how they broke free.

All through his discussions about instincts he also talked about a high school foot race that was a defining moment in his life. Although not a jock, he began to run with a passion. This culminated in a steeple chase race against a team whose coach was named satin. At the starting line he suddenly realized satin wasn’t the coach but a runner who looked every bit like a man. Ready, set, Go! The race spread out gradually with the fastest runners breaking away, the average runners clumped together as a pack and then there was Satin followed by TJ. It became clear TJ wasn’t going to win but he decided to sprint at the end of the race to beat Satin. He reached down for that last minute reserve and discovered there was nothing there. Blind sided he stumbled across the line last.

He discovered there are no great victories as you struggle to expand your horizons and grow into a more social creature. It isn’t a sprint to we won. It is instead a life long goal, a marathon. This was a show that spoke directly to my insecurities and creative blindness. I can not recommend this show enough.

There is only one more show of Marathon today at 1:45pm to 2:45pm in the yellow venue in the Orlando Shakespeare Center (812 E Rollins St., Orlando, FL). Tickets are $11 along with the $9 Fringe button that is required for all the shows. Just GO!