Hollywood Fringe Festival: Some Winners. Some Turkeys. All on the Cheap

GELFAND’S WORLD-If you are looking for inexpensive theater, comedy, and music, the Hollywood Fringe Festival is the place to be for the next two weeks. 

Not every show is going to be  your cup of tea, but as one of the festival organizers explained to me, the idea of a fringe festival is that you may experience a real turkey one hour, and then enjoy a marvelous experience the very next hour. 

And better yet, it's all on the cheap. That's because the festival's organization is open to anybody who wants to mount a production, and strongly suggests that each show hold its prices down to the $10-15 range. Some are free. Thus it was that I saw, within the space of 3 hours, one of the worst plays I have ever experienced, a middling comedian, and then a joyous experience of acrobatics, music, and dumb jokes just an hour later. 

By the way, why is the festival called the Fringe? Short answer: Back in 1947, Rudolph Bing (later famous as Sir Rudolph Bing, director of the Metropolitan Opera) founded a drama festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. 

The festival itself involved serious performances of music and theater, but its existence attracted lots of other, smaller theater groups who set up shop around the edges of the festival-proper. One critic waggishly referred to a fringe growing up around the Edinburgh festival, thereby giving it a name, and through that name an official existence. 

The Fringe attracted university drama companies, small theater companies, and late night comedy reviews. It attracted tourists by the tens of thousands, became world famous, and is going stronger than ever, more than half a century later. 

The concept of the Fringe created interest all over the world, and pretty soon, multiple fringe festivals sprang up. The difference is that these newer festivals  lack the giant opera companies and symphony orchestras that populate the original side of the Edinburgh festival. The Hollywood Fringe Festival isn't going to get the Royal Shakespeare Company or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. 

Instead, it gets dozens and dozens of smaller companies doing humor and pathos and all sorts of experimental work, and there are even a few companies doing their own take on old classics. There are also a substantial number of solo acts. 

So there I was, standing in line with perhaps a hundred and fifty other people at 10:30 pm, awaiting the opening of a late night comedy review that was at least a little reminiscent of the Edinburgh Fringe. Four Clowns presents The Halfwits' Last Hurrah! was our destination. The show was written partly by Don Colliver, who claims that his writing partner Jamie Franta actually wrote most of the words. Whoever and whatever, it worked. 

The show ostensibly involves a small traveling circus or vaudeville company that is having a bad night. A couple of performers including the knife thrower are missing, and the MC (played by Colliver, something of a doppleganger for the FBI agent on the television show Bones) angrily takes over the knife thrower's spot. We understand that comedy or tragedy will ensue. 

Meanwhile, one couple does an acrobatic comedy routine that harks back to the postwar years when American and English comedians made fun of Germans and German culture (think Danny Kaye and James Cagney). Performers Jennifer Carroll and Dave Honigman play the Inderdorf twins, Helga and Fritz, who do flips and sexual innuendo in alternation, and sometimes even at the same time. 

Charlotte Chanler does a routine which must be unique among comedy and drama. She sings a selection from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana carrying a hand puppet. At one moment she is doing her own vocalizations, and then at the next moment, she switches into a ventriloquist act in which the puppet sings. And this being Orff, they are both singing in Latin. Yep, this is vaudeville done up right. 

On Saturday night, Chanler ventured a trip into the audience while doing the song. Not knowing what to do, I shook hands with the puppet, and he shook mine back. This show is very audience-interactive. Her operatic sound is surprisingly good for a comedic actress. 

Elizabeth Godley is the pixieish, almost unbearably cute sidekick to Don Colliver's MC. To quote Colliver, she is something of a comic genius. She manages to maintain a connection with the audience through her little-girl smile, while doing voices that break the audience up. I suspect that she has a future in the local industry. 

As the cast members explained, the show was put together through a series of improvisational sessions wrapped around the idea of a second-rate traveling company that does all the old burlesque and vaudeville acts. This means that there is a lot of physical comedy, something that the Four Clowns organization has excelled in over the years. The lead writer Jamie Franta doubles as a burlesque stripper with a voice out of a 1930s screwball comedy. 

I expect this group to sell out fairly early. And did I mention the lady on stilts who does a plate spinning act? 

As a newcomer to the Hollywood Fringe, I began by going to see a play that I had heard about in advance. D'Arc Voices: Retelling the story of Joan of Arc is of potential interest due to the recently released book about Jean D'Arc and also due to the fact that a southbay company will be doing its own Joan of Arc production later in the year. 

The play I saw on Saturday has exactly two virtues: 

1) It starts on time. 

2) It ends on time. 

The play's notes claim that Joan was burned at the stake for cross-dressing. This is, by itself, a bit of a stretch to say the least. The catalog continues by stating that "D'Arc Voices' examines the human struggles of gender identity that tormented the Maiden from Lorraine." 

it's potentially an interesting theme, except that the play seems to have forgotten to develop the gender identity theme within Joan herself. There are a lot of actors and actresses who circle the Joan character and continue to berate her about wearing men's clothes. They may represent the voices in her head, but at other times they are her real life persecutors. What we don't get is any kind of answer from Joan herself, other than the fact that God told her. She seems supremely uninterested in the question. 

What's left is a caricature of the difficulties of being a Catholic in medieval times. There is a nagging mother, a loving but ultimately uninteresting sister who at least gets to do her own death scene, and a lot of men wearing monks' clothing. 

I've gone on a little long about this failed play because it pretends to take on an important theme about gender identity, which it does not do. But then, it takes us on a misleading path around, not through, one of history's more interesting characters. Joan of Arc is important because she changed history, not only as a military leader but as a political force. For a modern play to concentrate on the fact that as a military commander, Joan wore armor, is to force fit a modern obsession on a time that thought about things differently than we do now. 

Jane Edwina Seymour as the queen of Aragon found something in her role and managed to add some depth. The rest of the characters, with the exception of Joan's sister, were played as unsympathetic people who were set in their beliefs and their authoritarian personalities. If you want to see a harrowing portrayal of the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, may I suggest Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent era film The Passion of Joan of Arc. 

Along the way, I dropped in on the final minutes of Skitso, a solo act by an Australian actor/comedian who spoke at length about his dreams of going to New York to become an actor, and his conversion to a life of standup comedy. He interspersed his autobiographical material with the voices of Dustin Hoffman, Sly Stallone, and others who are ostensibly speaking to him as inner voices and giving him career advice. The voices were done pretty well. On the other hand, the old standup comedy theme of either going to New York or leaving New York was already done to death 40 years ago. 

This act diverged from that dead old horse a little, but the dream of knocking them dead in NYC is, I think, a little dreary to Los Angeles audiences. We're getting tired of being the third city, Chicago already having claimed its status as the second city, particularly because we're also sometimes referred to as the cultural capital of the world. 

One of the enjoyable aspects of the Hollywood Fringe is waiting in line for the next performance (did I really just type that line?). The reason is that we are visited by people who hand us postcards and talk about their own shows. I met the solo performer of The Oy of Sex, and one of the performers in Hamlet Mobile, a production involving 8 short plays performed in a van. And Hamlet Mobile is free. 

Also in this summer of Shakespeare, there is Love Labours Won, which is advertised as a "pick of the fringe" from the 2006 and 2007 Edinburgh festivals. The star of the show walked along our waiting line, handing out fliers and chatting up his future audience. If you can believe the flier, this one ought to be a keeper. 

The Hollywood Fringe tries to deal with the sometimes experimental level of its performances by giving us viewers the chance to write reviews that are available on a separate section of its website. Most of what I found there is effusive in its praise. I saw exactly one negative review in the 5 pages I scanned, so either there are lots of great shows waiting for me to see, or the volunteer reviewers are mainly trying to steer us towards the acts they liked best. Maybe it's both.

 

(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 49

Pub: Jun 16, 2015