Posts tagged with ‘Single White Female’
More on Reviewing
Just in case you’ve missed it in the comments, Johnny and I are engaging in a discussion of reviews – why do we write them, why do we read them, should there or is there a standard by which we evaluate Fringe festival shows (with the implied question of whether that standard is different from the standard we’d use to evaluate Non-Fringe Shows)?
I want to directly address Johnny’s most recent comment, because I think he brings up some awesome points, and I don’t want to forget to talk about any of them.
Thank you for the response. I read the linked reviews. What I saw was one daily newspaper give it a negative review while the other gave it a middling-to-negative review. Both are writers who’s byline I’ve seen in previous years, which answers this question of yours: “But have these reviewers ever been to the Fringe Festival before? Like, even once?”
The third review is a rave review, but it’s not from a general-interest daily newspaper, but a specialized industry website that says it exists to provide “information and inspiration for Minnesota’s performing arts” It is also a long-form, first-person essay, which is not like the brief capsule reviews the newspapers run.
I just went and read audience reviews for the show and they seem to fall roughly into the same three categories as the reviews you cited: negative, middling-to-negative and rave.
To me, this example doesn’t really fit the issues you raised in your second point of the original post. Where does “on crack” fit in here?
Both of those newspaper reviews were written by actual arts writers, although Ross Raihala is, I believe, usually more of a music critic than theater, so less practiced at viewing and writing about theater. So that only halfway proves my point about random journalists reviewing shows. But it does illustrate the wide range of responses in the media to Fringe Festival shows – Playlist is more of a personal essay, as you said, with the focus on the writer’s personal connection to the piece. The newspaper reviews are perhaps more focused on what the readership of each newspaper would or would not enjoy. Which brings me to a question:
- Are we reviewing shows for a specific group of people, and who are those people? How will they use our reviews?
Tenet #1 of my Fringe-Reviewing Philosophy: As a Fringe fanatic, writing for FringeFamous, I am writing for medium to heavy Fringe users. I’m writing for ultra-passers, artists, people who see a ton of shows. The reason I say this is that I think FringeFamous is, itself, Fringe famous. I.e. if you don’t spend a lot of time at the MN Fringe, you’ve never heard of us.
That’s not universally true, and that’s not to say that sometimes-Fringers can’t use our site to help decide what to see, but I think our target audience is the hard-core Fringer.
Presumably, then, the bigger publications are writing for a wider group of people, a fatter slice of the demographic pie. They’re reviewing Fringe shows for people who aren’t as familiar with the Festival. In my opinion, if you are writing about Fringe for a publication with a decent sized circulation, it is your responsibility to do your homework. Get to know the Fringe. Be the expert, so that your readers don’t have to.
A better example of “have these reviewers ever been to the Fringe Festival before?” and “Are you on crack?” would be this review of …a Murder.
Nancy Ngo seems to be a writer for the paper who doesn’t otherwise specialize in theater or arts coverage. Which is maybe why she would recommend a show to her readers which includes “excessive dialogue [which] made it difficult for the audience to follow - as well as for the actors to memorize their lines”. She’s recommending a show in which the actors weren’t memorized? That does not sound “Worth Considering” to me. She seems to have a super low standard for what a “good” Fringe show is. Which brings us to…
- What do we expect from Fringe shows, and is it different from what we expect of professional theater productions during the regular theatrical season?
Tenet #2 of my Fringe-Reviewing Philosophy: I am willing to meet the show where it’s at. If you are doing an experimental dance show with no music, I’ll show up expecting experimental dance with no music. If you are a Normal Guy doing your first ever play, I will arrive with the understanding that you aren’t a professional. If you are an established performer or theater company, I will expect something good. Even if it’s more of an experiment, something that doesn’t fit in with the rest of your professional theater season, something raw or new or in-progress, great. I’m not expecting perfection. But if I know you are good at what you do the rest of the year, I will be less likely to forgive a totally half-assed piece of shit.
I have no beef with you or this web site, I’m just trying to understand where you are coming from.
Right on. It’s mutual.
Personally, I enjoy reading reviews from numerous sources (audience members, newspapers, blogs like this one), and I use them to help me decide my own Fringe schedule.
Yeah – in my mind FringeFamous (and the Strib, and the PiPress, and Playlist, and Daily Planet, and audience reviews, and, and, and) is one of many different resources that Fringe-goers will use to determine which shows they want to see. I personally read everything I can get my hands on, and ask everyone I know what they’ve seen, and through the mess of information shows start to emerge that appeal to me.
But there are a lot of people in the Twin Cities who are not Fringe fanatics like me, who maybe have heard of the festival but don’t even know where to start in terms of picking a show, and these people turn to the Pioneer Press, or the Star Tribune to help them choose. (See above re: doing your homework and being an expert.)
I still wonder about your use of “free for all.” Fringe itself is unjuried, so to me, it truly is a free for all. Maybe I am seeing things differently.
Yes, the Fringe is itself a free-for-all. I love that anyone can put on a show, that there isn’t some committee of people to judge whether your work is “good enough” to be in the Festival. I think that creates a really vibrant, diverse, exciting Festival. But I don’t think reviewing the Fringe, or viewing Fringe shows, should be a free-for-all. This goes back to Tenet #2 – take each show for what it is, but don’t condescend to the festival. If something is lazy, it’s boring. If something is engaging and daring and smart, even if it’s rough around the edges, or half-finished, it can be electrifying. I’m saying, the Fringe has its own standards. Those standards are different from the standards we use to decide whether we liked something we saw at Mixed Blood, at Park Square, at Open Eye. But they are standards. I’m saying hooray for first-time play-makers, and experimental performances, and naturalistic drawing room dramas, but don’t tell me something is worth seeing because the actors tried hard, and don’t tell me something isn’t worth seeing because it’s not Guthrie-ready. That’s over-simplifying the Fringe experience, which is condescending to everyone involved, and I will not have it!
Is it just me, or is the 2011 Fringe super weird?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
I love the question “what is terrorism?” I love the debate between non-violent activism and militant activism, between the hippies and the Weather Underground, between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. I love that the theater is a place where we can explore these philosophical differences, and I am pro-Political Theater.
But this was some bullshit.
The script was fine. Not amazing, but not horrible. The acting was fine – the performers were solid, but not so strong that they could make an OK script compelling. But I was with them, I was following them on their journey as they executed some left-wing organization’s plan to plant bombs in the building where the IMF and WTO were meeting, and I was right there with them when they came back to their hotel room after planting the bombs, turned on the television, and watched the events of September 11th, 2001, unfold. (This, by the way, is where the play should have started. This is the crux of the question the play is asking, and we only spent seven minutes on it.)
And then! We hear actual audio from a New York newscast on September 11, 2001. The newscaster’s shocked silence, the struggle to find words, the heartbreaking eyewitness interviews. And we watch our OK actors react to the news. Now, this should be an incredible moment, watching these people, who have just planted b0mbs under a building, react to what’s happening in Manhattan. But to play actual audio from that day is a cheap trick. Because we immediately stop caring about what you’re doing on stage. If you’re me, you’re smelling that burning smell that emanated from lower Manhattan for weeks after the attacks. If you’re me, you’re hearing sirens and fighter jets and helicopters and then a strange silence – New York is never silent.
That is some PTSD-triggering shit, and it’s a fucking cop-out. It would have been way more interesting to have no audio, and to just watch the actors react to the news. To let them show us, instead of tell us.
Better luck next time, guys.
I have questions for Tennessee Williams.* This show is a quick 25 minutes, with a post-show discussion (which yours truly skipped out on because I was worried about travel time to my next venue). But it packs a punch in those 25 minutes. These two characters are so vulnerable and so violent and so hard-headed and so manipulative for the entire time that I don’t think the play could be any longer. It would collapse under its own weight. Plus, there is something wonderfully galvanizing about the lingering questions after the sudden ending.
My only wish for this production is that Matt Rein was a little more of a Tennessee Williams man. You know the type – think Stanley in Streetcar. The kind of man you are afraid of and also want to fuck. Rein is a great performer, and holds his own opposite Jaimi Paige (who is stellar), but I wanted him to be sexier. More powerful. More virile, more angry, more confused, more everything.
Maybe that seems nitpicky, to complain about the sexiness of one of the actors, but so much of the show depends on the chemistry, the toxicity, between these two characters that when one of them doesn’t feel quite as fleshed-out as the other (no pun intended), it’s a big deal.
But not big enough of a deal that you shouldn’t see this. And then come find me and talk to me about it.
* look for my one-woman show at next year’s Fringe: “Questions for Tennessee Williams: One Woman’s Epic Journey Through A Series of Drunk Southern Men”
Camelot is Crumbling: An Arthurian Nightmare
Listen, I don’t know what phillip andrew bennet low does. Is it storytelling? Is it spoken word? Sometimes it sounds like slam poetry, sometimes like epic verse, sometimes like nothing else on the planet. Sometimes it sounds like the inside of low’s head which he’s spitting forth, desperately seeking some sense in the jumble of words.
I don’t know what low does, but I’m obsessed with it. Because it seems like he’s seeking desperately for the truth, and I can get behind that. This year’s show is messier than last year’s. Like, literally the stage is messier and full of props and set pieces that I didn’t think needed to be there, and there is this weird voiceover thing going on, but the whole performance feels like part of a longer journey. Feels like part of a larger picture. Feels like part of a question – one of those questions that’s so big that the hardest part of answering the question is formulating exactly what the question is.
This show is not for everyone – in fact, I don’t know who it’s for, really, and I don’t know if low knows who he’s writing for, except himself. But he’s not writing for himself in a selfish way, he’s writing for himself, and then sharing it with us in hopes that we can help him along the path. Because we’re on the path, too, whatever the path is. The path for truth? For philosophical enlightenment? For mutual understanding? Any of those. All of those.
I liked this. I did. But, I think the world is too easy on mimes. (Never in my life did I think that sentence would come out of me…) This show got a Standing O yesterday, and granted David Gaines is a great performer and works really hard for 55 minutes, but…I think a lot of the audience had never seen a mime show before. In fact, I heard someone say “I’ve never seen anything like that before!” And as someone who has had multiple friends go through clown school (don’t ask), and who has seen a fair bit of clown and mime, I have to say I think it’s kind of unfair that a solid performance benefited from the audience’s ignorance to earn a Standing O, rather than a stellar out-of-this-world performance earning it the old fashioned way. Which, as I’m sure you’ll point out in the comments, is more the audience’s fault than Gaines’.
The show is basically a one-man version of the epic Seven Samurai, and each of the Samurai are clearly recognizable characters with individualized fighting skills, marching gait, and way of seeing. I had fun meeting each of them. Only, sometimes the battle scenes are a little imprecise (wait, what just hit him in the head? Is that the sleeping Samurai or the star-throwing one?), and the pacing kind of drags in the middle. This show has toured several Fringe festivals, so it’s not like Gaines hasn’t had time to fine-tune it. This is what I mean about audiences being too easy on mimes – if we’re impressed with most of your show, we’ll overlook the messier parts, because holy crap, mime! There aren’t even any props! You just show us with your body what’s happening! Holy shit, mimes!!!!!!
Having said all that, I am in awe of how articulate a person can be just with their body. Gaines is an experienced and skilled performer, and this show is definitely worth seeing (especially if you’ve never seen a mime show – it may blow your mind).
This show is Reginald Edmund’s twisted love letter to the Twin Cities, and I really liked it. Edmund is a bona fide up-and-coming playwright (I will resist the catch-all “emerging”, but “up-and-coming” maybe doesn’t convey the clever, quick, funny, thoughtful writing – Edmund is clearly a master of the craft), and Jay Dub is a local legend, and that writer-director pairing is really successful.
The show gets off to a slow start with a ghost-ish story about a couple lost somewhere near the river at St. Anthony-Main. The actors are great to watch, even when the material drags (Darius Dotch is especially great), but the show gets better as the pace picks up.
The second vignette, about a St. Paul sculptor trying to find her creative mojo after losing her wife in the 35W bridge collapse, was the stronger of the two. JoNae Villeneuve and Adam Western have a great rapport as the sculptor and her agent, and the sense of creepy almost-magical-realism that has a slow burn in the first short play appears with a jolt in the second piece.
Totally worth seeing, especially since it’s at the Rarig and whatever else you were trying to see there is probably going to sell out. Let’s give this playwright some love.
Ten Reasons Why I’d be a Bad Porn Star
I didn’t see Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman last year because it kept selling out, so this was at the top of my list of shows to see this year.
May Lee-Yang is fun to watch on stage, really funny and engaging, and she’s clearly a strong writer. But as soon as we got somewhere interesting, it was time to move on. The show is structured around the top ten reasons why May Lee-Yang would be a bad porn star (reasons like “I am not athletic” and my personal fave “I am picky”), but the show seemed more driven by this checklist than by the ideas therein.
After a conversation about Porn for Women (those super condescending photos of dudes doing the dishes or whatever) she shares two of her hilarious and bizarre sex dreams, and makes a point about women not being able to enjoy a sexuality outside of strict socially-acceptable boundaries – and Asian women in particular rarely being portrayed in media (pornographic or otherwise) as sexual unless it’s in a fetishistic way.
Yes! This is an awesome conversation! Where are we headed next? Are we going to connect this back to Lee-Yang’s experiences teaching sex ed to teens in a correctional facility? Are we going to hear more about the numerous but hilariously non-specific words in Hmong used to talk about sex?
No? We’re going to jump to the next number on the top ten? Oh, okay.
I don’t know, maybe none of this matters - it was clear to me that the Hmong crowd in the almost-full house was happy to see themselves on stage, hear their stories, their voices. And the feminists were so happy to hear a straight cis-gender woman admitting to liking porn, that maybe the big takeaway is that those of us doing work that doesn’t reflect the mainstream experience, work about ourselves and our lives and our weird fetishes and obsessions, we need to keep doing that work. Because people want to see it.
Also if anyone is a Passion Parties rep, give me a holler – I had no idea that Pure Satisfaction Gel existed and I want to board that train.
I was so excited about these guys last year, and wished that they had done more original material and less Marceau. Well, I sort of got what I wished for? This year Kirsten and Dean were joined by Renee Howard, and the entire show was original material. But a lot of the material didn’t quite gel. Renee stood out in a solo piece involving a bird’s first flight, and a cat’s delicious snack, a bit that proved to have both a sad ending and a sense of humor. That could be said, as well, for “He loves me not?”, a piece by Renee and Dean that takes a simple conceit and pushes it to the edge of ridiculousness and beyond.
The reason that comedy works as comedy, especially classic clowning and mime, is that it takes something normal, something not very funny, something sad and ordinary, and pushes it, magnifies it, holds it up for our examination until we are forced to realize that, yes, we humans are ridiculous. There were wonderful moments of ridiculousness in this show (I’d like to add Kirsten’s State Fair heimlich maneuver to that list), but I left wondering how all of these separate bits were connected.
Michele Campbell est un professeur super-cool, n’est-ce pas? J’ai aimé beaucoup d’écouter á Mademoiselle, et de ses histoires de la classe de Français. (Il y a été plus longtemps que j’ai doit faire des compositions en Français, donc j’espère que vous allez me pardonner, vous Francophones.) Mlle Campbell n’est pas une actrice avec beaucoup d’expérience, mais elle est très charmant, et elle aime beaucoup raconter des histoires, et elle aime beaucoup ses étudiants. S’il y a des petits moments maladroits entre la texte, il y a aussi des moments brilliants ou touchant.
Alors, un soir bien passé. Je ne m’emmerdé pas du tout. Quatre étoiles.
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