I only managed four shows today, before I felt like I was going to keel over and die. The fact that the last show I saw was my least favorite of the day probably didn't help matters. Anyway, here's my Day 3 roundup:
VELVET SCRATCH: VOYAGE TO NOWHERE. This one definitely goes into the category of "weird." I guess it's best described as a series of macabre tales, as seen through a Tim Burton-esque lens. When the audience enters, there are three women on stage (with one caught in a spider's web), all dressed in torn, dirty white dresses, and with heavy white makeup on, and fairly large black rings around their eyes... looking not dissimilar to Mrs. Lovett in the "Sweeney Todd" movie. So, over the course of an hour, one of the women narrates a slew of stories about how various women met untimely deaths and ended up in the underworld. The scenes are mostly acted out by the two other women (who have very little dialogue assigned to them), and all accompanied by a lone guitar player onstage. There are also songs thrown in every now and the then. The stories go something like... there was a girl who wanted to be a ballet dancer, but she couldn't fit her feet in her ballet shoes, so she cut her toes of, and bled to death. Or, there was a girl who liked to read, but one day while reaching for some high books, she fell off the ladder, broke her glasses which she needed to read, and drowned in her tears. The stories are of course more detailed, but that's the general gist. I'm glad the show was only an hour long, because I don't think I could have sat through much more of the show. But what there was was interesting enough, though I found I really had to concentrate, because it wasn't the most riveting stuff I've seen - though I did find my concentration was rewarded. Not the most amazing thing I've seen, but a nice change from the other goofy stuff I'd seen so far, for though there is a certain amount of pitch black humor in here, it is not at all what I would term "goofy.:
LOVE IS DEAD. A musical comedy about a mortician who talks to, and has sex with his corpses. I know it sounds bizarre, but it was really quite entertaining. Thankfully the sex with the corpses is only mentioned, never actually demonstrated, thought the dead people are all played by living actors, so I guess it wouldn't have been that disturbing anyway. The story in a nutshell is about how three women - a dead one, an obsessive compulsive one, and a DNA analyst who's investigating a series of murders - all fall in love with the mortician. The music is pleasant enough - not so melodic that you leave humming, but not atonal either. And the actors do a wonderful job of bringing their characters to life. My only quibble was that in some sections of the songs that required harmony, there were some frightening sounding notes hitting my ears, because certain singers' voices either weren't singing the right notes, or just didn't blend all that well together. But that really only caused me to cringe I think twice, so it wasn't too terrible. Anyway, I found this show to be quite entertaining - not blown away, but certainly an extremely enjoyable two hours or so.
GARGOYLE GARDEN. This is one of those shows that is so not being marketed properly. Based on its description, I figured it was going to be a happy little kiddy musical about a kid who hangs around with gargoyles - I was thinking like Quasimodo in the Disney version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," or maybe something a little more macabre. This one is labeled as Fringe Jr after all. And it's by the people who brought us "Minimum Wage," which I didn't see, but I assumed was your typical silly Fringe satire, I think of fast food workers. Anyway, "Gargoyle Garden" is not some happy silly little musical. This is a chamber opera that sounded like it wouldn't be out of place on the stage of City Opera (note, that is not necessarily a compliment, because the new American operas they present there are almost universally awful). And though it's less than an hour long, I don't know how many children could stand listening to something with such melody-free, and serious minded music for even that long. And to be perfectly honest, with the exception of a couple of silly lines referring to gargoyles pooing out pebbles, this could easily have been marketed solely to adults. I did note that there were very few children in the audience today, despite the "Fringe Jr" rating in the guide. That all said, I did begin to enjoy the show by the end, and I think this may be one of those pieces of music that is better enjoyed on multiple hearings. It's definitely not what I would call a particularly accessible piece of writing. Well, at least it's something unlike most of the other musicals at the Fringe. And though it takes a long time to warm up to, especially to get over the shock that it's almost entirely sung through, I will say that thanks to a particularly strong final few arias, I left fairly satisfied. I'd be curious to maybe get a hold of a cd of this to see if it's less painful on second listen.
TIME, ET AL. I was really looking forward to this, based on it being co-written by Gil Varod, of the hilarious Broadway Abridged blog, and the equally hilarious "Oedipus for Kids" that was presented at NYMF a year or two ago. Well, this time he's left the comedy behind for a serious minded, extremely depressing science fiction play. It's about a guy in the present day who starts corresponding with a girl from 1925 via her diary, and eventually falls in love with her, and tries to figure out how to meet her, and then to marry her. It's the sort of thing that might have made a fine short story, but as a full length play - I think it ran an hour and forty-five minutes, including intermission - it seemed interminable, especially in the second act. There are only three characters (the guy in present day, the gal in 1925, and the brother and roommate of the present day guy), and I can't say I really found any of them all that interesting. The first act details the meeting of the two lovers, and the second looks at their awful relationship, once they're together. It could probably use a bit of trimming, but it wasn't awful - though I was thinking the premise didn't seem all that original. In the second act, where we find out the pitfalls of permanently leaving your time to live in the future, just moves at a glacial pace, with scene after scene just showing us how miserable the couple is together. I found myself thinking this could have made a fairly decent play if it were a 45 minute one act. But there as just not enough interesting material to make for an compelling full length play. In the defense of the writers, this was the first performance of a new play, and I would think even by the second performance, they'll have made changes - well, one can only hope, anyway. Still, with so many other far more enjoyable Fringe shows out there, I really can't recommend seeing this.
For the rest of the week, I'm just planning on seeing one show a night, so hopefully that will allow me to recover in time for some more theatre marathons next weekend. I'm already getting burnt out and it's only the first weekend of the festival. Oy.
