Reviews for FronteraFest Performances
Review: Things in Life by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on February 03, 2009
Imagine, if you can, this very very Anglo looking guy converting himself into a 63-year-old black man who ran a hotdog concession at a ball park for years. When he started to go there despite our age of political correctness, I almost held my breath.
Ben Prager's Long Fringe presentation carried the title "Things in Life," sufficiently enigmatic to cover just about anything that he might have wanted to do. The fest blurb advised only, "Actor/playwright Ben Prager uses a series of monologues to portray with unblinking realism a half dozen familiar types in various stages of life."He deserved his artistic license, considering that he has written seven shows of monologues and his "Four Monologues" was picked as one of …
Review: Leela's Wheel by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 31, 2009
Gemma is so good at shifting characters that she can give us a middle-aged woman seducing her crofter husband and make us believe in both partners at the same time.
Gemma Wilcox is a lively and inventive woman with a serious case of multiple comic personalities. Her two-act show Leela's Wheel runs about an hour and you never know who (or what) she's going to be next.This piece is dialogue-based, almost never in monologue style. One accepts fairly quickly her theatre convention of transferring instantly from one character to another by shift of position, body English, voice and accent. The impression is a bit like …
Review: A Matter of Taste by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 30, 2009
There's a core here of irreverent, smart alecky writing that delivers a good time on stage. The sketch format doesn't allow much character exposition, so we're provided jagged humor tied to the incongruities of the imagined situations.
Playwright Bastion Carboni has some good ideas but he gets in their way. There are five ingenious skits in this Long Fringe entertainment but he has the mistaken impression that an audience will be as interested in the creative process as he is.Carboni has actress Jenny Keto preface the evening with a confused, swaggering but finally non-helpful appearance as "the playwright." And at the end of a pretty enertaining evening he brings on the director(?) …
Review: Kill Will by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2009
The finale? Think Jacobean revenge tragedy. I counted five corpses onstage at the last scene with two more characters rapidly approaching extinction. The company plays it all with sufficient seriousness for us to go along.
There's no Shakespeare in it, but it's certainly full of sound and fury. Signifying. . . .?Think of a crime caper that takes place in the sleazy east London, with a dose of pulp detective attitude, nasty obsession with lowlife violence, guns and Irish prolixity. Austin Alexander plays the lead in his own creation. Mickey Nichols is a guy in a bad way, roughed up in turn by black-leather gangster William Slate, by American cocaine …
Review: The Drowned World by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2009
The finale finds us with two couples, of unexpected composition, the first imprisoned in that drowned world and the second in inscrutable apotheosis.
Ken Webster's austere staging of this vision of a nightmare world uses the vocal and emotional projection of these four actors with the formal eloquence and depth of a string quartet. The music here is their inflection, counterpart, and conviction in a narrative that raises the hairs on the back of your neck. Ben Wolfe appears first, in solo, as Darren, citizen in a world drowned in gray totalitarianism and decay. Motionless, from the depth …
Review: My Bugatti Story by FronteraFest
by Michael Meigs
Published on January 26, 2009
Ehrmann has a lot of himself invested in this narrative. At times he comes across as confessional or woodenly self-obsessed, perfectly in keeping with the character.
My Bugatti Story is playing at the Salvage Vanguard Theatre as part of the 2009 FronterFest Long Fringe. Writer Paul Ehrmann plays Alexander, the principal character. Though there's a cast of six, the show is essentially a long monologue by Ehrmann, interspersed with illustrative scenes. The near-monologue format is appropriate, for most of the action is taking place in his head, or at least in his fantasies. At the opening, Alexander is found in a …