The Fringe Festival takes center stage
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Try to strike up a conversation with any local actors right about now, and they’ll likely give you a wild-eyed look and mutter, “Can’t, rehearsing my Fringe show.” Just nod and smile, and let them prepare. With more than 150 shows at 22 venues over 11 days starting July 30, the Minnesota Fringe Festival is all-encompassing—there are funny shows, sad shows, shows you go to as a favor to a friend, musicals, spoofs, and parodies galore. The official website at fringefestival.org is a recommended first stop, but here are a few shows that have The A.V. Club intrigued.
Tickets to all shows cost $12 and also require a one-time purchase of a $4 Fringe admission button, which is good for all subsequent shows. Multi-show passes range from $50 to $150.
PEOPLE BEING FUNNY
Sideways Stories From Wayside School
One of the most consistently, confidently, and absurdly funny companies in town, Four Humors Theater hasn’t disappointed with its Fringe shows either, exploring everything from an impotent Satan in 2006’s Deviled Eggs to Shakespeare and Marlowe as Elizabethan spies in 2007’s Bards to last year’s death-defying Mortem Capiendum. This time out, the company adapts Louis Sachar’s comic young-adult series about the wacky Wayside School—and if anyone can make acting childish funny and smart, it's these guys.
Like A Virgin
Motor-mouthed Brit Jimmy Hogg has become a Fringe staple and a fan favorite, not just here but at Fringes across the country. His knack for making stories of everyday life gut-bustingly hilarious should find easy (and plentiful) fodder in this history of sexual awakening. It’s not really an act, either—buy him a drink after the show to find out more.
Hogg And The Humors
It’s a two-fer: Jimmy Hogg joins the Four Humors Theater for improv comedy.
An Intimate Evening With Fotis Part III
Funnyman Mike Fotis of the improv duo Ferrari McSpeedy goes solo for the third installment of his Fringe show, in which he sits in a chair and tells stories about himself and his new dog—that might sound low-key, but few local comics are as explosively funny as Fotis, even sitting down. (See also The A.V. Club's video interview with Fotis.)
Tragedy Of You
Perennial Fringe fave Joseph Scrimshaw puts the Bard in a blender in this Shakespearean tale of woe, murder, and heedless ambition starring some random person he pulls out of the audience. Scrimshaw has long since proven his keen-witted ability to make fun of the canonical tales (as in Macbeth's Awesome Scottish Castle Party, the most popular show in the 2007 Fringe), and here, it's unlikely whether you'll need to worry whether he knows how to be (or not to be) hilarious.
The Harty Boys In The Case Of The Limping Platypus
Joshua Scrimshaw—brother of Joseph, with whom he forms the Scrimshaw Brothers comedy duo—teams here with Levi Weinhagen as co-writers, co-directors and stars of this parodic take on Franklin W. Dixon's teen-detective heroes the Hardy Boys. The show aims to be thrilling enough for kids but slyly satiric enough for grownups.
PEOPLE BEING SERIOUS
The William Williams Effect
William Williams was almost not the last man executed in the state of Minnesota—sentenced to hang for the murder of his homosexual lover, Williams' trip up the gallows was an excruciating disaster. That botched job led to the abolition of the death penalty in Minnesota. With an original script taken from trial documents and performed by Twin Cities stalwarts Balance Theatre Project, this slice of local history is not to be missed.
You /Provoke /Me
Chicago-based Same Planet Different Worlds Dance Theatre teams up with New York artist Faye Driscoll and Minneapolis choreographer Daniel Stark to present the regional premières of a number of dances dealing with sex and love, including the solo “Watch Me Harder” and the quartet piece “Ripple.”
TWISTS ON CLASSICS
Masha 3000
Russian playwright Anton Chekhov got a lot of mileage out of the dark particulars of the human condition: infidelity, death, silent and not-so-silent suffering. He also apparently really liked the name "Masha," because characters so named appear in both The Seagull and Three Sisters—love-torn daughter Masha Shamrayev and unfaithful, petulant middle sister Masha Prozorov. Minneapolis comedian Erin Search-Wells projects Chekhov's women into a future surrounded by video monitors, online avatars, absurd repetition, and disembodied voices. Think of it as Max Headroom crashing into Masterpiece Theater—and bring your 3-D glasses.
Storm Still
Fringe Festivals can get a little heavy on the Shakespeare spoofs, but this is no shtick. Using King Lear as a launching pad for razor-sharp dissections of youth, power, and purpose, Madison-based Nonsense Company (which performs regularly on the coasts) should fulfill the great buzz it generated this spring as part of Bedlam Theatre’s five-company ensemble Lear. If you ever thought your therapist was a fool, wait until you see this.
The Curse Of Yig
Actor Tim Uren made audiences creep with his 2006 Fringe hit, an adaptation of horror maestro H.P. Lovecraft's The Rats In The Walls. He goes back to the graveyard for another Lovecraft tale, this one based on a story Lovecraft co-wrote in Weird Tales magazine in 1929, in which a group of pioneers in the Old West fall prey to a monstrous snake god.
SHOWS SOLD BY THEIR TITLE
Best Little Crackhouse in Philly (…Or Crackwhore: The Musical)
Show creator (and Minnesota native) Stan Peal came up writing Christian theater but thoroughly lost his way. The Lord’s loss is our gain, though, as he created a show about tap-dancing crackwhores that manages to be hilarious, political, and a two-time top prize winner at the New York Bad Musicals Festival.
Boobs
"Tales of boobs. Our boobs. Our big boobs," says the website Molly Dimba and Kari Kelly's show. What else is there to say?
Editor’s note: Although writer Carl Atiya Swanson performs in Love Me Or Die! at this year’s Fringe, he has no connection to these shows.
