Yesterday was Show Tune Sunday at the Fringe Festival, at least for me. In the afternoon I attended “Oscar and I: A Rodgers and Hammerstein Sing-Along with Mrs. Anna” at MuCCC. Mrs. Anna, in case you didn’t know, is one of the great R&H characters — the “I” in “The King and I,” in fact […]
Fringe Festival
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: The Lonely Ones
Of the many pleasures an event like the Fringe Festival provides, probably the greatest is the ability to occasionally discover hidden gems amongst the line-up. Those times when your decision to take a chance and check out a performance you might not otherwise have given a second look pays off big time. For me, it […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: Mounafanyi
On Sunday I got to check out African performance group Mounafanyi at MuCCCC as part of the ongoing Fringe Festival. The day was overcast and depressing, a kind of grim precursor to the upcoming work week, but I was happy to find a burst of energy in the Mounafanyi performance. In fact, if I were […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “Waiting at the Crossroads Cafe,” “Anomaly”
I saw only two shows at the Fringe Fest on Sunday. While they were wildly different in content, they were alike in two ways. First, they showcased some of the truly astonishing artistic talent we have right here in Rochester. And second, they cemented for me that the quality of Fringe Festival shows in general […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “Psychopomp & Pageantry,” PUSH Physical Theatre
Fringe Festival Day 3 and a full bill of dance and theater for me: Garth Fagan Dance, FuturePointe Dance and PUSH Physical Theatre. Three hard-hitting local biggies. Each so much its own entity that seeing them all in one evening was like reading three good novels back to back to back. How can you digest […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: Garth Fagan Dance
By nature, the Fringe Festival varies widely in scope and talent. Let’s just say, when it came to seeing Garth Fagan Dance on Saturday, it was good to come in from the rain knowing I was about to see expertise. “The spirit has to come out to grab you when we dance,” Fagan told the […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “Not Wallace Stevens,” “All Your Questions Answered”
According to Just Poets member Roy Bent, the group titled its Fringe Festival program of original poetry “Not Wallace Stevens” because while Stevens is undeniably a great poet, he’s one who’s “good on the page, but not on the stage.” It’s a characteristic endemic to poetry as a whole, and their group hopes to change […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: RIT Film & Animation Honors Show, “Rochester Stories,” “The Daughter of Capulet,” “Interviewing the Audience,” “Old Maid and The Thief”
My Saturday at Fringe Fest was all about storytelling. I started off with the RIT School of Film and Animation Honors Show, screened at Little Theatre 1, which offered 26 of the best works produced at the school last year. While many of the short films were the work of students obviously flexing their burgeoning […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: Marc Maron
About halfway through Marc Maron’s set at Kodak Hall Saturday night, Maron did an impression of himself stalking around in his early years. He said, mockingly, “I had to own the stage.” The irony was, all these years later, with a far more subtle (though not always) approach, he owned the whole theater. In fact, […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “Alice in Wonderland,” Roisin Dubh, Silent Disco
I like to think that I am, at the very least, somewhat thematic. I’ve been playing the video game "Kingdom Hearts" the past few weeks (it features a slew of Disney characters and settings), watched the original Disney animated version of "Alice in Wonderland" earlier this week, and in that same line of thought, decided […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “Almighty God Bierce,” “The Author’s Voice”
Ambrose Bierce’s (1842-1913?) death was enigmatic — a journalist who traveled to Mexico in 1913 to interview Pancho Villa, he simply vanished, hence the “?” — but his life was definitely a troubled one. Fighting in the Civil War, an unhappy marriage, and the death of his children helped add vitriol and disillusion to his […]
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Fringe Fest 2013 Reviews: “A Man, A Magic, A Music,” “Bag of Tricks,” “Ping,” “Same Sex Shakespeare”
“A Man, A Magic, a Music” is a one-man show starring Movin’ Melvin Brown, playing at Geva Theatre Nextstage as part of Fringe Fest. The piece is essentially Brown’s life story as told through a retrospective of black pop culture from the 1950’s through the early 21stcentury. Brown was bitten by the showbiz bug at […]
