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Minnesota Fringe Festival shows can be uneven, overambitious, unexpectedly brilliant — or all three at once.
With more than 100 productions scattered across the city, the Minnesota Fringe Festival is too sprawling to capture in a single take. This is just a small sample: four shows that stood out for their concept, execution or sheer chaos.
From a reanimated insult comic to a Shakespeare lottery, here’s a glimpse of what this year’s Fringe has to offer.
‘A Sad Carousel 2: The Timely Death of Herschel Douscheburg’
Star, producer and co-writer Sam Landman is a perennial in the Twin Cities theater scene, frequently playing put-upon, shambolic everymen. Here he plays the title character, Herschel Douscheburg, and turns the typical Landman role feral. Douscheburg is a boorish insult comic who exploded at a previous Fringe Festival 15 years ago and has just awoken from a coma, his lounge suit fused to his body.
This is, in fact, a sequel to 2010’s “A Sad Carousel,” and the show knows how preposterous it is to have had such a long gap between productions. Superficially, the story is about the conflict between an older school of scabrously hilarious jerks and a new world of timid and socially aware comedians, but Landman and company don’t take sides. Both are treated as awful.
Instead, the show is astonishingly overstuffed with jokes about theater, Twin Cities performance in particular — and, especially, the Fringe Fest. It’s fair to assume that there has never been a show that joked about local actor Tyler Michaels King as frequently, alongside jokes about Equity cots, the physical process of staging a play and the hollowing out of local arts coverage.
It’s very in-joke, but never precious. Instead, the show has a galloping knockabout sensibility that recalls cartoons more than a live stage show, and if you miss one joke, there are seven more right behind it. My favorite: Trying to remember his past, Douscheburg can only remember the audio from assorted Vine videos. Me too, Hershel. Me too. (Max Sparber)
‘GUNS! the Musical’
Finger guns come out immediately in this show, although “finger gun” isn’t quite apt, as the cast of 10 carries pretend automatic rifles and other firearms of the imagination. Cries of “Pew! Pew! Pew!” ricochet around the stage.
A woman next to me at Theatre in the Round leans in and whispers, “Is this ‘GUNS! the Musical’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet?’” which is also playing at the theater.
We look at the stage. One of the actors racks what seems to be an air bazooka.
“GUNS! the Musical,” I say. She scurries out.
It’s too bad, as she immediately misses a part where 5-year-old Little Johnny Bonham gets his kneecap blown to bits at his birthday party, after his father gifts him an AR-15, which he uses to “blow out” the candles on his cake. The adults in the room, all packing heat, are frantic. The solution? Ban knees, and, eventually, whatever else gets in the way of the Second Amendment. And so the hour-long musical comedy begins.
Writer-director-producer Bryce Kalal has delivered something cathartic in a nation that leads the world in gun violence and school shootings. The musical makes plain just how absurd our inaction has become. The topic is grim, but the script and cast deliver a punchy satire with an irreverent stream of parody, puns and athletic slapstick (no knees make for funny walks).
Where “Guns! the Musical” misses is the musical part. For one, the instrumentals of the live band (which are great) overpower the vocals, making it difficult to hear them at all. When audible, the songs feel like an afterthought instead of driving the plot and heart of the show. There are some musical comedy winners tucked in, though, like when the band plays 9-1-1 hold music and the cast grooves with their beloved firearms. (Alex V. Cipolle)
‘Romeo and Juliet: Lottery Style’
What show could be more fittingly ruled by fate than “Romeo and Juliet?”
Performed and adapted for nearly 450 years, this classic might seem exhausted — but Katherine Warmka’s production proves there’s still room for something new. In this stripped-down version, five performers are assigned roles at random. This lottery-style casting is determined at the top of the show as they each select their role by drawing it from a pile of paper scraps on the stage floor.
Shakespeare’s original usually requires two or more hours to perform, but Warmka shaved off enough to fit into the 50-minute Fringe Festival limit; it gets right to the point. While the adaptation skillfully conveys the emotional arcs, it moves so swiftly that I occasionally longed for more time to sit with the love and the loss. It still delivers the play’s most famous lines and brings the audience into its most tender and devastating moments.
The performers are what make the show. The cast’s command of the language and their ensemble chemistry result in storytelling that feels both seamless and immediate. Composed of current and former University of Minnesota Duluth students and a faculty member, the cast demonstrates how full knowledge of the entire production yields a deeper, more cohesive performance than focusing on a single role alone.
Every performance will feature different pairings, but Olivia Nelson’s Juliet was raw, personal and brilliant. Her balcony scene opposite Warmka’s Romeo is warm and touching — it captures what all the best love stories should feel like. Molly Fabian’s Mercutio was boisterous and emotional in just the right way.
This “by chance” casting elevates the age-old story above traditional, gendered or established retellings and instead makes it a story about the ultimate demise of those who dare to love past prescribed standards and boundaries. (Anika Besst)
"The Writers Room: A Failed Documentary"
Fringe theater has its tendencies. It sits on the edge of mainstream theater. It’s associated with heavy-handed messaging and often populated by white suburban theater kids, trying to work through their mommy issues. At least, that’s what the opening monologue of “The Writers Room: A Failed Documentary” suggests — a notion the show proceeds to skewer and interrogate for the next 45 minutes.
Set among a group of comedians as they prepare for their Fringe Festival slot, “The Writer’s Room” is a collection of sketches on a variety of topics, which at times lampoon the sorts of shows you might see at a Fringe Festival. One has a man in a fedora dryly reading dialogue and stage directions from a sex scene in a made-up Wes Anderson movie. Another sees a lesbian couple singing through a lovers’ quarrel while trying to build IKEA furniture.
The show is self-aware, showing the somewhat chaotic process to creating a Fringe play. It breaks up sketches with scenes inside a writer’s room, where comedians argue about what should be allowed in the production.
One writer insists that the show should rely heavily on local references and jokes, which is shot down almost immediately. Another repeatedly fights to have his sketch about a food critic imprisoned in Auschwitz included — an idea that is also hated. Initially, the joke comes off as tasteless, provocative just to provoke. But a second glance reveals a smart jab at a recognizable strain of Fringe humor.
Some of the sketches that do make it to the stage aren’t fully formed, with awkward blocking that could have benefited from another rehearsal or two. However, the handmade quality of “The Writer’s Room” feels right at home for a pastiche and send-up of the Fringe genre. (Jacob Aloi)
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