New Review: Be Brave, Anna!

Yes, I did it -- I reviewed 21 shows in this year's Fringe. Can't believe it.

Here's Be Brave, Anna!

And here's the tease:

Call her Vickie Lynn Hogan, Anna Nicole Smith, or proof that our culture teems with talentless celebutantes: Tara Schuster's Be Brave, Anna! asks us to feel for the late starlet and nearly succeeds. The 60-minute piece, directed by James Rutherford, parades most figures from Smith's circle before us, blaming all for her demise. But because both author and director have asked Jessie Renee Hopkins to seem even dimmer than Smith was in real life — not an easy task — it's tantamount to placing tacks on a raceway and revving the engine.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: III

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Despite my caveats, I loved the play. Here's the tease:

One casualty of gay relationships is often the memory of past lives and loves, because until recently such relationships tended to lack offspring. Except to fine-arts scholars, for example, the name Monroe Wheeler — a transformative figure at the Museum of Modern Art — likely doesn't register today in the public consciousness. Nor will writer Glenway Wescott, Wheeler's companion for more than 60 years; nor will photographer George Platt Lynes, Wheeler's other companion during 15 of those years.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: The Chronicles of Steve: The Bossy Bottom

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

In David LeBarron's kinetic and kitschy solo show, it isn't only the title character who's out in the world searching for love and hoping -- and praying, demanding, beseeching, and assuming -- he'll find it through his tush, through awakening "the drag queen that lives up your ass." There's another fellow, also named David, hunting for the same thing.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Thoroughly Stupid Things or the Continuous Importance of Being Earnest

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

You're unfamiliar with Montserrat Mendez, you say? Oh my dear, then you must go off to your garrulous Google or your yappy Yahoo and absorb all you can about him! He is — and I say this with envy — a perfectly marvelous playwright, and his Thoroughly Stupid Things, a sequel to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, is a comic masterwork.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Creena Defoouie

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

In the title role of this surrealistic revenge tale, Charlotte Barton-Hoare is gussied up like a Goth chick and given to bulging eyes and melodramatic poses out of a penny dreadful. As a counselor to the mentally ill, Creena DeFoouie is mad in two senses of the word — in that she's insane and that her beloved sister is dead. Who killed her and why is what drives her nuts — and us too.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: The Longest Running Joke of the 20th Century

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Some playwrights use peculiar experiences to stoke their art. Yet I'd conjecture that few have been through anything like Stephen O'Rourke's experience working with the mentally ill for the last 18 years. The Longest Running Joke of the 20th Century — perhaps not the right phrase for this monologue — is a talented effort, well delivered by the playwright, to work through the conflicting feelings he's developed for his day job as well as for a playwriting career too often put on hold.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Nudists in Love

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

The married couples living in Gardenia are mostly everyday folks putting down roots, watching their flowers grow — natural stuff. But when word gets out that the president of their homeowners association likes to visit a naturalist resort, much shade is thrown in this charming if inoffensive new tuner.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Wish We Were Here

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Do I really believe Michael Phillis, who wrote and performs in Wish We Were Here, really watched a genie pop out of a hookah while smoking marijuana? Well, no, but it turns out to be an amusing divertissement of a play. His character — called Master by the genie, played by Christine Corpuz — made the error of asking for infinite wishes when she granted, six months ago, the first of his more traditional three.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Now That She's Gone: Unraveling The Mystery Of My Mother

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Barbro Snortland was an enigma, mostly an infuriating one, to her youngest daughter, Ellen, from the time Ellen was born, we learn, until Barbro's death in 2002. Now That She's Gone, however, is considerably more than a poignant and insightful recounting of the lives of a mother and daughter who never connected well.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Thumbelina: The Story of a Brave Little Girl

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

That writer-director Liza Lentini opts for the actors to make their costume changes before the audience smartly demystifies theatre for young folks and provides unexpected charms for the adults who might join them. At 30 minutes, the piece is a summer breeze spiced with bits of adult parody, such as when the sparrow offers Thumbelina part of her food supply — "regurgitated maggot mix with earthworm heads."

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Becoming Britney

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

....the show's authors don't know what they want Becoming Britney to become. In one scene Spears is told she has to sing a song about what she wants because musicals require it — and that sends a metatheatrical red flag that comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. Curley's direction is solid, but the choreography — by Mandy Bell, Lisa Navarro, and Bell — is overdone. And either we should sympathize with Spears or not, but not both. Why undercut such a dippy enterprise?

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: The Gay No More Telethon

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Michael DiGaetano, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Albin E. Konopka, who co-wrote the music with DiGaetano, should be more curare-tipped in their satire. Certain numbers — especially a heartfelt ballad, "Everything" — inject truthful and sincere notes into a tale that works best when light in its loafers. And ditch the hoary subplot involving a fake bomb and love matches that no antigay rhetoric can squelch. Abeles and James offer fine performances; the rest of the cast is in need of more rehearsal. Note to director Dennis Erdman: Keep it gay, keep it gay, keep it gay.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: One Seat in the Shade

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Being a gay couple for 27 years is something to be proud of; it can also evoke a need for change. In John Reoli's clunky, sweet-natured One Seat in the Shade, directed by Bruce Ornstein, one couple learns the hard way what's best for them.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Scratch

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Scratch Scratch off your list. Aimee Gonzalez's plodding adaptation of Medea, directed by Meiyin Wang, resets the tragedy in an urban netherworld in which Medea (KK Moggie) is an agoraphobic shrew and Jason (Adam Tsekhman) is a world-class ping-pong player romantically ensnared by some offstage siren.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: See How Beautiful I Am: The Return of Jackie Susann

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

For a little more than 60 breathless minutes, Debora Weston holds the audience in the palm of her fist as Valley of the Dolls novelist Jacqueline Susann. Directed by Paul Dubois, Paul Minx's script beautifully conveys all of the author's charming and maddening stylishness and sexiness. Susann, a full-blown narcissist, used her ample supply of sex and brains to leave her stamp upon the world.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: The Fabulous Kane Sisters in Box Office Poision

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

As Sophia on The Golden Girls would say, picture it: Pocatello, Idaho, 1956. The Fabulous Kane Sisters — loose Lana (Marc Geller) and nutty Nova (Bill Roulet) — are hired to perform at an old theatre. Nearly 20 deaths under mysterious circumstances have occurred at the house, but Shifty (Brent Erdy), the ladies' agent, conveniently forgets to tell them. What the Kane sisters find at the theatre — and why everyone laughs until their sides hurt — is a phenomenal takeoff on mystery films, backstage comedies, and gay camp, including delicious one-liners.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Choose Your Own Play

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Long-form improv is notoriously hard to do, as it's usually predicated on being funny, thinking fast, and sustaining it all for a whole evening. With up to 100 characters and 80 possible endings for their story, the Houston-based troupe presenting Choose Your Own Play makes its task especially difficult. So even if the show was only half successful, it might qualify as triumphant.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: China -- The Whole Enchilada

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Technical snafus, such as wonky mikes and CD players, hardly fazed Brad DePlanche, Eric Hissom, and Philip Nolen of Mark Brown's fabulous musical parody China: The Whole Enchilada. Good thing — it's a laugh riot.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: The Vajayjay Monologues

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Lindsay Burns' The Vajayjay Monologues is a wonderfully dry riposte to Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues. As directed by Vicki Stroich, it mocks Oprah Winfrey's use of the term vajayjay to great comic effect but also seriously questions why society still remains uneasy about women's genitalia.

Sphere: Related Content

New Review: Perez Hilton Saves The Universe (Or At Least The Greater Los Angeles Area): The Musical

For Back Stage, as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

Here's the tease:

Britney Spears is dead. With her funeral hours away, terrorists Habib and Kebab are set to nuke L.A. Only gossip guru Perez Hilton can save the day -- if Kathy Griffin doesn't steal the show.

Sphere: Related Content