Fringe|Famous

Is it just me, or is the 2011 Fringe super weird?

1. There are no great life-changing standout shows this year. Or there are fifty great life-changing standout shows this year. Most years after the first weekend, I have some sense of who is going to Win the Fringe. But this year there doesn’t seem to be a clear front-runner (I mean, aside from Joe Scrimshaw, who could sell out the proverbial reading of a phonebook if it was called “Joseph Scrimshaw Presents: The Entire Yellow Pages!”). Or maybe there are fifty front-runners. I’m having a hard time narrowing down the list of shows I want to see because I keep hearing buzz about EVERYTHING. Which means NOTHING.
2. What is up with the on-crack reviews coming from the bigger newspapers? I love that I live in a city where the Fringe Festival is a big enough deal that the mainstream press sends a team of journalists to cover it. But have these reviewers ever been to the Fringe Festival before? Like, even once? How can the same show get a “Must See!” review in one paper, and an “Avoid Like the Plague!” in another paper? Critics are allowed to have differing opinions, from each other and from me. But there doesn’t seem to be any standard against which critics are measuring Fringe shows. It’s like a free-for-all. It shouldn’t be this hard to figure out which Fringe shows are working, and which aren’t.
3. Why is everyone so angry about the pre-show announcements? I have heard so much bitter smack talk directed towards these announcements. The reason the pre-show speech exists is because morons keep leaving their phones on during shows, and chatting in the theater seats after the show is over like it’s the Southdale AMC. If you hate the pre-show announcements so much, you better be turning off your cell phone like a fucking champ. Just think of the pre-show like the safety spiel on an airplane, or the robot lady who explains how to leave a message after the beep as if you haven’t left eleven thousand voicemails in your life. Yeah, it’s mildly irritating if you see a lot of shows, but it’s not doing you any actual bodily harm.
4. WTF, Moto-i? True fact: I was never a huge fan of the Bedlam. The bartenders always ignored me, and the whole place smelled like sweaty bicyclists. But it was ours. During the month of August, it was all Fringe all the time at Bedlam, and I appreciated that. Southwest High School class of 1986? You suck. Why are you having your reunion at Moto-i on a Fringe night? I do not care about your retarded slideshow of past glories, and if you don’t move that fucking slideshow screen I am going to have to shove past it in a rude and slideshow-disruptive manner. Oh, wait, I just did. Fringe Central is where I get the lowdown on what to see, what to skip, what has partially-naked hotties in it, who has a surprisingly good singing voice, where the best new Fringe-adjacent food is (thanks, Gaye!), et cetera. Not to mention getting drunk and telling people what I really think of them and/or their show. But when I have to fight off a birthday party or a reunion or a stupid-confused bouncer from Moto-i, I can’t get any of this shit done.

-SWF-