Captain Squishy’s Yeehaw Jamboree

Remaining performances: Saturday, July 25 (tonight!) at 5 p.m.

They say: From the writers of last year’s hit I Like Nuts! comes a ridiculous new musical about a comedy variety show, with a murderous ingenue, a WWI German spy, and of course, bacon!!! It’s Captain Squishy’s Yee Haw Jamboree!

Brian says: Hey Teddyo, you ever been to the American South?

Ted says: Nah man. It’s too silly down there for me.

Brian: That’s true. You are really serious. Well it’s a good thing you didn’t see Captain Squishy’s Yeehaw Jamboree then. It would’ve sillied your poor little brains out.

Ted: But I did see Captain Squishy’s Yeehaw Jamboree. In fact, you and I saw it together.

Brian: Wait a secorino—that’s right! You were that guy sitting behind me ticklin’ my earlobe all night.

Ted: If you say so.

Brian: Well listen, you were so good at ticklin’ that I forgot to ask what you thought of the show.

Ted: No time like the present….

Brian: So what’d you think of the show?

Ted: Ripping good fun.

Brian: More adjectives!

Ted: Tuneful. Cheeky.

Brian: More!

Ted: Hysterical. Zany. Occasionally flatulent.

Brian: And gimme a blurb that’d look good on a program!

Ted: Ah yes, let me see…Captain Squishy combines seat-of-the-pants Fringiness with flawless execution and enough wit to fell an elephant.

Brian: Amen. And how about “My Boyfriend Chad”—you know, that song about stealing your BFF’s BF? An ingenious comic number…even in a show that was less plain silly and absurd, it would’ve been side-splitting.

Ted: Seconded. Speaking of which, we gotta mention Susie Smalltown.

Brian: Whew! Hell yes. She was smokin! She may be the most supple actor I’ve seen at the Fringe.

Ted: Dude. That’s way inappropriate.

Brian: Um, no dude. Being supple is a good thing.

Ted: Yeah, but it’s the kind of good thing that…if a blogger points it out in a public forum…it gets that blogger either reprimanded or charged with misogyny.

Brian: Dude, whatever. Susie would love it. Susie, if you’re out there, I think your performance was supple. Supple!

Ted: I’m practically soiling myself in anticipation of what these folks will mount at next year’s Fringe.

Brian: Wait, Ted, weren’t we supposed to write this review like a week ago—when we actually saw the show? What’s our excuse?

Ted: There really is no good reason for not giving Captain Squishy’s Yeehaw Jamboree its due.

Brian: What would you say is its due?

Ted: Accolades! Great commercial success! And a good See it if and Skip it if.

Brian: I’d say, See it if you came to Fringe to have your socks knocked off. Or if you rarely wear socks in the first place. Or if your socks are riddled with holes.

Ted: And I’d say Skip it if you’ve a low threshold for topsy-turvydom. Or for funny accents.

Brian: Hey, stop tickling!

Hopelessly Devoted

Remaining performances: Thurs., July 23 at 9:30 p.m.; Fri., July 24 at 9:45 p.m.; Sat., July 25 at 2 p.m.; Sun., July 26 at 3 p.m.

They say: Chicago Improvisers/Catholics Vincent Lacey and Natalie Sullivan offer up scenes, songs and secret confessions of being devout fish in a sea of pessimism. Bursting with guilt…err…love Christ, Hopelessly Devoted is a comedy even Saint Peter couldn’t deny.

Ted’s take: “In the unlikely event of the Rapture,” Natalie Sullivan advises the audience at the opening of Hopelessly Devoted, “please pray for your own sins before praying for those around you.”

The chance of rapture here? As advertised, unlikely. The chance of mild amusement courtesy of two talented comedians? Much higher.

Sullivan and Vincent Lacey, two funnypeople of the unrepentant Catholic persuasion, have mounted a pleasant diversion over at the Goethe Institut, a zany, ADD-style compendium of sketches, one-liners, a song or two, and even a borderline-charming hip-hop number about the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, which is hemorrhaging believers and whose few remaining parishioners call it the “Church of the Blessed Sack.” There’s a lot of biography going on here, too: Lacey adapts winning character sketches of his reluctantly devout father and of his dean at Catholic University. Sullivan, meanwhile, steals one of the shows’ more uncomfortable scenes, in which she remains the confirmation sponsor of the ex-boyfriend she convinced to convert, even after dumping him. True story! So, yes: not your run-of-the-mill Christian lampoonery here; this is been-there, still-there, ain’t-never-recanted Christian lampoonery.

Sullivan and Lacey seem to know they’re not really slaughtering sacred cows here, even among references to “Jesus Motherfucking Christ” and songs like “I’m a Conscientious Masturbator.” These strokes are meant more to endear than to shock, which is a welcome strain in High Church-needling humor. What isn’t apparent is why, except for the performers’ shared faith-based experience, these two are lending their estimable skills to what remains a potshot-based revue. A lot of these jokes have been uttered more times than the “Hail Mary,” and whether the comedian’s Jewish or Jesuit, they tend to come out sorta formulaic. It might clear things up if the material reconciled their parodies with their pieties.

See it if: Sister Act never struck you as juuuuuust a little bit hokey.

Skip it if: You think to yourself, “Yep, Eddie Izzard probably hit that first.”

Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Stories

Remaining Performances:
Jul 23rd, 7:30 pm
Jul 24th, 6 pm
Jul 25th, 6:30 pm
Jul 26th, 1 pm

They say: “Neofotis performs stories from his prize-winning book, newly published by St. Martin’s Press. With tales of night-swimming lovers, moon-shining old ladies, and gay trials, come witness the 28 year-old love child of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty! (NYC’s Next Magazine)”

Brian’s take: I’ll not mince words: Concord, Virginia, has too many words.

When I’m writing prose, I read my sentences aloud so that I can hear all the over-wrought language I need to banish from the pages. Here, as Peter Neofotis performs aloud two short stories about a small Virginia town, I couldn’t help but wish he’d taken a machete to his manuscript, pruning what are otherwise perfectly compelling stories of thorny phrases like, “She wistfully walked by,” “Helen pointedly replied,” and, thorniest of all, “They ambulated out the door.”

But the biggest problem with Concord, Virginia isn’t the amount of words, but rather its too-heavy reliance upon them instead of character. That’s not to say the characters aren’t periodically attention-grabbing, or even at points well-drawn; but generally, it was a challenge to tell them apart. Not until halfway through the first story did I know for sure which of several college students was testifying before the jury in a case of frat house sodomy. Neofotis’ ability to inhabit multiple distinct characters — already no simple task — is muddied by the energy he has to expend trudging through the narrative as artfully as possible. His characters would be fuller if each had his own relationship with language, his own truly distinct style of speech, and also his own desires for silence. A silence in the theater has huge potential to thrill and enchant. Unfortunately, Neofotis is simply doesn’t leave enough unsaid.

See it if: You don’t mind it when prose turns purple.

Skip it if: My review is already too many words for you to bear.

They Call Me Mister Fry

Remaining Performances:
July 25, 4 p.m.
July 26, 5 p.m.

They say: “Welcome Back Kotter vs. COPS, King Arthur vs. No Child Left Behind. Watch this suburban white boy from Indiana battle the students, the establishment, and himself in a South Central classroom. Laughter, tears and extra credit provided. A true story.”

Brian’s take: All right, so I walk out of They Call Me Mister Fry, and here’s my first thought: “Mister Fry Is The Patch Adams Of Education.” (It appears in my mind just like that, with all the capital letters.) Genius, isn’t it? I’m happy, I’m whistling, I’m skipping, I’m handing out Now and Laters to babies, I’ve got the first line of my review.

Not so fast. Turns out I wouldn’t be the first to make the Jack Freiberger-Robin Williams connection.

Shucks.

So besides a pedagogical Patch, or perhaps Mr. Fry, what shall I call Jack Freiberger, the cuddly and lovable protagonist of this one man show? How about a tearjerker, a laughmonger, or an “awwww”-squeezer. How about a man so endearing you almost want to see him orchestrate some kind of sick and depraved orgy during his lesson, just so you can accuse him of a flaw.

All right, maybe I wouldn’t call him that last thing. It was titillating enough to watch Fry’s classroom foibles as a neophyte fifth grade teacher, particularly his relationship with two problem students, Anthony and Jasmine. As Freiberger tosses his hands and grunts his yos, or clanks his knees and chomps his gum, the novelty of a white, middle-aged teacher standing in front of a room of people and imitating his Latino and black fifth grade inner-city students is magnified. Freiberger dares to play the kids’ stereotypical ticks for laughs, and at first this makes the impersonations a bit uncomfortable. But as his relationships with the students deepen, and the obstacles that confront them escalate, so do Freiberger’s characterizations undergo a sneaky metamorphosis: the belligerent Latino student who says “yo” every other word becomes an 11-year-old who speaks sign language and pulls a cappuccino out of his pocket while he’s in detention, and the nervous, gum-chewing daughter of a single mother becomes a confident — albeit still fatherless — young woman.

But here’s what Freiberger dramatizes most masterfully, and most intimately: that formative instant, which occurs in every child’s life (though earlier for kids with these kinds of troubled lives), when you realize that adults (your parents, your grandparents, your teachers, your Mister Fries) are more terrified of the big-bad-world than you are. It’s a devastating epiphany, and it’s Freiberger’s willingness to relive that moment with his students that makes They Call Me Mister Fry such a triumphant tragedy of self-recognition.

See it if: You liked Welcome Back Kotter and Boston Public, not to mention all those feel-good teaching shows in between.

Skip it if: You’d rather watch the Ferris Bueller’s Day Off marathon on TNT.

Remaining Performances: Wednesday, July 22nd at 10 p.m.; Friday, July 24th at 8 p.m. [SOLD OUT]; Sunday, July 26th at 2 p.m.

They say:  “Riding on the sold-out success of last year’s Chocolate Jesus and Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby, SpeakeasyDC presents yet another sure-to-be-Fringe-fave, THE SIN SHOW featuring true stories about pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and wrath.”

Glen’s take:  Look, the SpeakeasyDC guys don’t need our help — they’ve a proven record at Fringe as both vets and all-stars, they’re selling out shows, they got a rave in the paper blog of record.  So they really don’t need us to tell you the show’s pretty great, but they’re getting it anyway, because, turns out? The show’s pretty great.

It’s great for the reasons their previous Fringe outings were:  With seeming effortlessness, these stories, and these storytellers, provoke precisely what they mean to — gasps, laughter (raucous and rueful, in turn),  along with quieter, more introspective reactions.

That seeming effortlessness is part of the game, because it’s clear that all seven performers — though they may evince varying degrees of comfort in front of an audience, or at least an audience this size — have worked over their stories,  shaped them, honed them into the versions they present to us.

This is particulalry true of the two tales that bookend the evening:  John Kevin “Gluttony” Boggs’ sardonic account of quitting cigarettes, and the emporkening that ensued; and Seaton “Envy”  Smith’s blisteringly funny screed against an old college classmate, which is nothing less than a master class in comic timing.

So, yeah, it’s great.  But let’s just note that their previous Fringe outings featured fewer performers (Chocolate Jesus: Four, Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby: Five) in more intimate spaces, so those evenings felt satisfyingly cohesive.

The Sin Show is looser, and considerably longer, and more uneven.  With seven performers, it’s easier to discern those who still need to work on their confidence, and those — like Saurabh “Lust” Tak, whose spin on the line “a warm TICKLE ran through my body” reduced the dude in front of me to boar-like snorting  — who’ve got it going on.

See it if: That Spalding-Gray-shaped hole in your heart? Yeah, it’s still there.

Skip it if:  “Shaped? Crafted?  That’s bullshit — Fringe means fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants!  First-thought-best-thought!  Boy, I’m angry about how unfair that is, but I will use this anger to inform my blowetry.”

The Escapades of Farty Johnson

Remaining performances:
July 23 at 6 p.m.
July 25 at 2:30 p.m.

They say: A physical comedy gestation!!! Join Harold P. Johnson, esq. (aka Farty J.) on a messy, manic, dreamy, hilarious dancin’ romp that may land you SPLATT! inside the soft spot in your heart. Door Prize: Can O’Beans.

Ted’s take: Patricia Krauss has found the perfect venue for her one-woman “physical comedy gestation,” in which the irrepressible Tooty Johnson—a metaphysically unmoored character played with the halting muggery of a Dana Carvey—sweats her way through an audition that never happens. Let’s do the math: It’s a 1.) self-referential piece of character acting that 2.) engages the question of how a terminally weird, delusional thespian goes about the agony of self-promotion without 3.) much of a gameplan but with 4.) a mystical reverence for the transmogrifying possibilities of the proscenium. Really, then, this is a show about the fringe (and the people who live there)—if not about Fringe itself.

It also, sad to tell, sports many of the classic Fringe pitfalls: spotty timing; an intermittent lack of discipline; and promising physical comedy that, in the absence of a better organizing principle, serves as its own message. Still, surprisingly touching moments shine through, including a soliloquy from Magnolia, a canine puppet who calls herself Tooty Johnson’s “fairy bitch mother” and observes that while everyone needs divine intervention, some—the Tooties of the world—need it more than others. Elsewhere, the noted direttore Federico Fartellini (complete with hook-nosed Commedia dell’arte mask) appears, and after confusing Tooty (the lady) with Così fan tutte (the opera), decides that perhaps he should give her a shot.

Two weeks ago, in a short capsule on this show’s sneak-preview, I praised Tooty’s dance, “an offbeat quadrille that somehow communicates deep sadness while keeping the audience in stitches. Can it sustain over the full 45 minutes?” The answer’s no; but I also think it could be something of a triumph, if Krauss pared down the monotonous quirk and fleshed out Tooty’s character. As is, we’re looking at a gestation indeed—from a gifted performer who’s perhaps a bit more gifted in the filigree department than in the concept department.

See it if: You’ve ever wanted to see a Beckett short performed by Garth from Wayne’s World.

Skip it if: You agree with Tooty that “waiting can be boring“—even when you’re waiting in the company of an affable contortionist.

The Real Adventures of Tom Mix

Remaining Performances:
July 22, 6 p.m.
July 24, 8 p.m.
July 26, 1 p.m.

They say: “The glamour of Hollywood meets the glory of the Old West in the real life, death-defying adventures of Tom Mix, the first western movie star.”

Brian’s take: Your grandmother’s armpits. The British Open. An assortment of mildly fragrant cheeses. All of these things are wilder than the West portrayed in The Real Adventures of Tom Mix.

Here’s the gist: Tom Mix was one of the first famous Western movie stars. He made hundreds of films — the vast majority of them silent — and the creators of this play have apparently used letters and historical papers and whatnot to construct a monologue for an actor who rarely got to recite one.

A compelling idea, sure: giving voice to the voiceless. But good lord, give that voice something to say — and an hour’s worth of vaguely interesting biographical facts does not count.

Playing the character of Mix, at least as it’s currently written, is a thankless task to ask of Jack Tomalis — or any actor really. And Tomalis doesn’t show the character much love in return. In lieu of their voices, silent movie actors, by necessity, drew upon a deep and dynamic arsenal of expressions. Tomalis, on the other hand, draws upon approximately two — his Consternated Face, and his Wistful Face. I left The Real Adventures of Tom Mix wearing my own version of the former.

See it if: Your grandma’s armpits are unavailable.

Skip it if: Thinking of the Old West inspires your Wistful Face. This failed homage will turn your nostalgia to sadness.

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 19th at 6:45 p.m.; Thursday, July 23 at 5:30 p.m.;  Saturday, July 25th at 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 26th at 2:15 p.m.

They say: “A World War II hero, his daughter and Vietnam veteran son confront the secrets that haunt and divide them. This powerful new drama, lightened with laughter, was inspired by the author’s father, whose war diary she discovered after his death.

Glen’s Take:  ”Emerging” local playwright Susan Austin Roth is a well-known and highly successful writer of gardening books, so should you see other reviews of Missing Pages busting out a lot of cheap gardening puns, you’ll know why.  Not here, though.  No, faithful F and P reader, here you will find no references to grafting, cutting or pruning;  that is my solemn vow.

A play that revolves around Alzheimer’s has a tough row to hoe.

Senile dementia is characterized by repetition, and that needs to be conveyed; one of Roth’s subjects, here, is the frustration that accompanies caring for aging parent.  For that frustration to register, we have to feel a bit of what is felt by her characters, doting Charlotte (Lynn-Jane Foreman) and taciturn Vietnam vet Andy (Joe Peck) as they struggle to deal with George, their alternately sweet and belligerent father (Robert Leembruggen).

That their father repeats himself so often is dramaturgically fraught, because in drama, repetition good, repetitiveness bad.  Those  moments when Leembruggen’s proud WWII-vet becomes lucid enought to chastise his son for being a deserter, coward and traitor feel real, all right, but they don’t move – they hit such similar dramatic beats that it begins to feel as if whole scenes have been cut-and-pasted throughout the script.

That would be a bigger problem if Leembruggen weren’t so appealing an actor — and one confident enough to convey George’s disease without broad, movie-of-the-week strokes.

Roth is on to something, here; she’s crafted some interesting parallels between father and son.  At this point, she’s still pushing them at us instead of letting us find them, which which is why, I think, the scene in which one of the father’s WWII memories combines with the son’s ‘Nam flashbacks feels as needless and over-the-top as it does.

Director Diana Denley tries to make it work, and is elsewhere quite nimble at the kind of low-fi stagecraft Fringe demands, but it’s no use.

Even so, Roth’s ending is satisfying and legitimately moving. Once her script loses its rhetorical training wheels, and she excises from her dialogue the kind of pre-digested bits of language more apt to crop up on TV than in real life (viz: “And what about what I need?” “He’s your father, too!” and “I know, Dad. I know.”) Missing Pages will be get leaner, tighter, and more effective.  If this current Fringe staging feels a litle shaggy and unkempt, well [GARDENING REFERENCE REDACTED.]

See it if:  You approach Fringe like a theater workshop, and are looking to discover a serious, rough but promising work.

Skip it if: You approach Fringe like last call at Camelot. (Woo!  Boobies!)  Or the phrase “My war was different than your war” sets off alarm bells.

Remaining Performance:
July 19, 2:15 p.m.

They say: “Sara Baartman? In 1810, she became ‘Hottentot Venus’, toured as a sideshow, her large buttocks displayed. When she died, pieces of her were displayed in a museum. In 2009 the booty is STILL on display! Deconstructing creatively explores body politics.”

Brian’s take: I’m a white guy. For all the jeers I got as a chubby kid on the Skins side of the grade school soccer field, my body has never significantly influenced the way I feel about, perceive, or comport myself. So when the cast of Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty asked audience members to yell out our first impressions after the performance, unlike the woman in front of me, I didn’t quite feel the urge to shout, “Familiar!”

Cat-calling, stereotyping, objectification; the hasty, sexual, and shallow first impressions that inspire all three — sure, I’m conscious of this stuff, and in fact I’ll admit I find thoughts of it tangoing through my mind more than I really understand why. But by no means is it familiar to me, and certainly not in the way it’s familiar to the black women who were in the audience with me, or the formidable cast of black women that have adopted a muse named Saartjiee (Sara) Baartman and mounted this pageant upon her shoulders.

In the 19th century, Baartman was taken from South Africa, re-christened “Hottentot Venus,” and sent on a tour throughout Europe as an exotic dancer in the most literal sense, her booty the subject of international fixation until well after her death when actual parts of her remained on display in a museum. But rather than craft the play from Baartman’s biography, the ensemble members weave it from what I imagine to be glimpses of their own — a discordant family reunion, a deflected come-on at a bar, a sequence from a dream or a fantasy or a restless night spent staring wide-eyed at the ceiling above the bed.

This choice — to let Baartman’s story percolate and linger in the shadows, instead of present itself straight — is to the piece’s advantage and detriment. At their weakest, the ensemble’s fables resort to relaying an experience rather than rendering it theatrical, and in certain moments I desired a Saartjie Baartman more character than muse, the shared experience of a race and a gender brought into vivid relief by the singular tale of one woman’s life. But at its strongest — in a tender serenade to a newly-displaced Baartman, or a wrenching exhibition of the naked body that will make you sit rigid in your seat — the cast earnestly and confidently commands the theater, demystifying the black female body (booty and all) while redressing it with a tantalizing mysticism all their own.

See it if: You thought this show was going to be about pirates.

Skip it if: You were hoping for a live-action music video to “Baby Got Back.”

Remaining Performances:
July 18, 9:30 p.m.; July 19, 1 p.m.

They say: “Jamaica. Revolution. Visa. Impossible. CIA. Seduction. Desperation. A dream. Heartbreak. Handsome. American. Customs. Million dollars. Duffel bag. Machetes. Goats. Prostitutes. Bullets. Adrenaline. Kerosene. Run for your life. Based on a true story.”

Annie’s take: No doubt you have at least a couple of friends, relatives, etc. who are known for their proclivity for extensive and often exhaustive storytelling. Whether these stories sprout up during your dinner conversation, your lunch break or your experience of that third dirty martini, they hold the potential to lull you to the brink of unconsciousness or inject you with a hearty dose of insight into the human condition. You can almost smell an “extensive and exhaustive” story from its opening words: take, for example, “Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles, son of Peleus,” or, if it’s been a while since high school Lit, “This one time, at band camp…” Whether the yarn-spinner be Homer or American Pie’s red-haired hussy-in-disguise, there exists a dangerously fine line between compelling and mind-numbing storytelling.

That being said, signing on for an 85-minute one-woman show presents the ticket-holder with a doubt or two. I’ll confess that I had my reservations. However, may it be known that Jamaica Farewell, Debra Ehrhardt’s narrative about her immigration from Manley-era Jamaica to promise-holding America, is a story worth sitting through. From the get-go, there is no uncertainty as to how the story will end: it begins in a Starbucks, which, in a journey-to-America story, signifies success as clearly as the Statue of Liberty. Like any story whose outcome is already known, it is the middle that counts. In Jamaica Farewell, the degree to which Ehrhardt fantasizes about life in America works as the comic frame and, as such, maintains the freshness of each bump along the road.

If the show has an Achilles heel, it is the possibility that its central character, an optimistic immigrant, might feel worn-out. However, Ehrhardt manages to survive that threat. Zipping across the bare stage in a pink shirt and jeans, she secures the audience’s affection with her Jamaican accent, astute physical comedy and rapid-fire jokes that manage at once to poke fun at and profess love for her home country.

Tales of immigration, and certainly those that clock in at over an hour, can rightly be termed “extensive and exhaustive.” Yet, like the bards of yore, Debra Ehrhardt possesses a rare ability to mesmerize that would have kept ancient Grecians sitting around the fire for hours.

See it if: Your facial muscles are supple enough to smile continually for 85 minutes.

Skip it if: The fact that you left your Adderall at home might present a problem.