Tag: Orlando Family Stage

Five strangers on a long-distance train ride uncover unexpected connections with each other — and within themselves — in “The Magic Castle Still Stands,” an eerie original play from writer Vanessa Frances and co-director Emily Kucala. Amelia Bryant stars as Harvey, an anxious young woman in mourning for her mother, who is taking her first solo trip to New York City. After their journey is derailed by an disturbing tragedy, Harvey bonds with Mikey (Ella Hadley), a chatterbox teen sharing her compartment, and discovers that Mikey’s BFF bears a spooky similarity to Iris (Victoria Lobdell), her elusive elementary school confidante.

Frances’s enigmatic script, which contains echoes of Jacob’s Ladder and The Twilight Zone (as well as more literary inspirations from Hesse and Dostoevsky), at first appears to be a supernatural thriller, before cleverly evolving into a psychological drama. The parental figures in the cast are annoying stock characters that are mostly around to argue, but the younger actors are uniformly excellent. Hadley gives an impressively grounded, natural performance as a child of divorced parents; and Lobdell and Bryant invest their intense emotional bond with unaffected familiarity far beyond their tender years.

The final scene unsatisfyingly introduces an eleventh-hour element that feels underdeveloped, and I wish the slow, silent scene changes were sped up by 500%. But those are forgivable flaws in a Fringe show such as this that features fresh, young voices in an imaginative, introspective story.

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “The Magic Castle Still Stands”

In their program description, veteran Fringe funnymen Rauce Padgett and Joel Warren — former hosts of the Festival’s much-missed late-night talk show — winkingly advise patrons to “smoke in the car” before the show. But even if you don’t puff-puff-pass, you definitely don’t want to pass on this brilliant hour of bite-sized comedy gems.

At an average length of five minutes, none of these 10 skits (plus a bonus encore) has a chance to outlast their welcome. Every single premise — from an Oprah-obsessed Top Gun instructor and an idiot burglar, to a demonic tipping debate and a modern update of Abbott & Costello’s “Who’s On First” — generates comedic gold, and at least 80 percent of the punchlines land with a big belly laugh, which is a spectacular statistic for any sketch comedy.

This is certainly not a show for the easily offended, with raunchy routines about a masturbating astronaut, phallocentric pirate, and self-hating gay cowboy. But Padgett and Warren are too goofy for their gags to feel mean-spirited, and they are always the biggest butts of their own humor. Fringers who feel like laughing until their sides are sore will surely score more than their money’s worth from these 10 Sketches.

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “10 Sketches With Rauce and Joel”

Medusa is back with a brand-new snake-free head, and she’s got quite a few bloody bones to pick with humanity — at least the male half — in this gonzo solo performance art piece starring writer Karen Anne Light and directed by Elizabeth Baron. Light’s reimagined monster is a queer femme icon who longs for the good old days when men were castrated to fertilize the fields; now she passes the eons by regaling her audience with gruesome Gorgon riddles and stories of infant cannibalism and lesbian anarchists with elastic labia, when not caterwauling orgasmically.

Eventually, the topic jumps to modern politics (which she initially promises not to discuss) with uneven results. I sometimes struggled to follow the connection from one interlude to another, especially during sluggish extended segments where Light inhabits the character of a breathy bubble-bather or an exhausted butter enthusiast.

This Medusa may not turn audiences to stone, but there’s certainly something hypnotic about her intensely focused eyes, fascinatingly flexible forearms and aggressively icy intonation. If you’re easily shocked by Sapphic stream-of-consciousness soliloquies about the toll of toxic hetero-masculinity, this might be too much for you. But you don’t have to be a harpy, historian or homosexual to be engrossed by at least the Medusa-centric parts of this production. The only prerequisite is patience, and an appreciation for out-there acerbic absurdism.

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “Prowling the Abyss”

Time may make fools of us all, but the indignities of aging are made especially foolish in “AWOL,” a two-man comedy from writer/performer Rob Gee. Jon Paterson co-stars as Cyril, a misanthropic octogenarian whose only friend in their retirement home is Neville (Gee), an amiable amnesiac whose positive outlook is the polar opposite of his own. Together, they blackmail their perpetually stoned caretaker and take off to attend a death metal festival in hopes of reuniting Cyril with his estranged granddaughter.

Gee and Paterson are both longtime Fringe darlings for good reason, and watching their clownlike flailing as they flee for freedom is a delight. When not playing the elderly pair, both actors slip into character as the biker gang members, rock stars and acid dealers they encounter along the way. Gee’s wordplay is both witty and wistful, as the odd couple gripe about a world (which hopefully awaits us all) where bladder functions and the daily dinner entree are your biggest topics of conversation. Their preposterous plotting at times evokes a geriatric Pinky & the Brain episode.

“AWOL” is a funny, imaginative show with an important underlying message about ageism, but coming from such a well-traveled team I had elevated expectations that weren’t entirely met. Ryan Gladstone’s direction is filled with frantic physical comedy and distinctive characterizations, but on opening night the timing and blocking were sorely in need of tightening. Ad lib digressions, which amuse in moderation, further sapped the pace, and pandering local references shoehorned between the script’s Britishisms also fell flat.

With a bit more polish, I have little doubt these pros will turn this into a production that makes you sing “hope I don’t die before I get old.”

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “AWOL”

Whether it’s a botched bleach job or a bad bowl cut, there’s no hair disaster that Nikki (writer/performer Joanna Rannelli) can’t repair, as she serves as a receptacle for her client’s most intimate confessions … but just don’t ask her to accept liability if you beg for bangs.

I’m the type of person who gets his hair cut as infrequently as possible at chain salons, and prefer not to chitchat with my stylist, but I thoroughly enjoyed my hour at “Bangs, Bob & Banter” meeting Nikki’s comedic clientele — including a feisty octogenarian, a harried helicopter mom, a cheating housewife, an impatient Karen and a chauvinistic male customer, among others — whose wigs and worldviews Rannelli slips in and out of with empathetic ease.

Rannelli gives each customer their own instantly identifiable voice and physicality, and director/dramaturge Kerry Ipema gives the play fluid pacing and visual variety — despite largely revolving around a hairdressing chair — which was impressively polished for opening night of a world premiere.

We never really get to know Nikki herself much beyond her pet peeves and Barbie memories, and although the script includes a thoughtful interlude with a chemo patient who’s liberated by her celebrity wigs, it only briefly touches on the stylist’s deeper role as unlicensed therapist and aesthetic time-stopper. Perhaps that deeper dive can be saved for a sequel, because Rannelli is a winning performer, and I’ll bet a buzz-cut that Nikki has more tress-tales to tell.

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “Bangs, Bobs & Banter: Confessions of a Hairstylist”

PUSH Physical Theatre, creators of the award-winning 2022 hit “Generic Male,” return to Orlando for the world premiere of “Hyde,” an atmospheric experiment in dance theater inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s horror novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that’s told from the monster’s perspective. Ashley Jones plays the titular terror, who enlists two performers (Heather Stevenson and Darren Stevenson) in retelling his story through thrilling, gravity-defying movement pieces set to Ricky Desktop, Peter Gundry and Gungor.

The trio, who wrote and directed the show collaboratively, reinvent the iconic transformation scene, sway in a deathly waltz, and mirror each other in a show-stopping shadow routine. However, just as these breathtaking demonstrations of dance combat and hand-balancing acrobatics are reaching their climax, they are interrupted by an inopportune phone call from an eagerly expected late arrival.

That launches Hyde into another fourth wall-breaking interrogation of the audience, whom he initially teases with seemingly silly interactive games before threatening to “do something terrible” and challenging us to stop him. Interspersed in all this are fragments of mournful monologues that hint a deeper meaning behind Hyde’s increasingly confounding confrontations with his viewers.

PUSH’s last production was the kind of show I could recommend unreservedly to nearly any Fringe-goer, but this work-in-progress is a far pricklier piece that features just as much thoughtful imagination, but in a far less accessible package. I personally felt the moody lighting was too murky, the ending was too enigmatic, and the overall balance tipped too far in favor of monologuing rather than movement. But for modern dance devotees who appreciate exceptional weight-sharing, as well as lovers of avant-garde expressionism with a gothic edge, “Hyde” will be another must-see.

Orlando Fringe Festival: Tickets and times for “Hyde”

One stormy night, six strangers stagger into an Orlando dive bar in search of shelter and unwittingly become experimental subjects in the biker-chic bartender’s (Sarai Goley) secret sociological study to discover whether COVID has caused a positive evolution in the human genome.  For the rest of the evening, the increasingly inebriated patrons — who include an irritable vet (John Moughan), an environmental activist (Komal Patel), an oily politician (Juan Robert) and a drag queen (Kevin Fox) — play Scooby-Doo over a missing bottle of valuable liquor while arguing about hot-button issues.

At this bar where nobody knows your name, there’s really nobody to root for among the bickering cast of shallow stock characters. The actors do their best to recite the densely written dialogue (by Goley and Fox, who also direct) as rapidly and energetically as they can, but with little sense of comedic timing, their jokes generated only a handful of genuine laughs throughout the preview performance. The plot ticks off many boxes on the Fringe Bingo card — lip-synced disco anthems, progressive political pontificating on a literal soapbox, and heavy alcohol consumption — but the comedy never kicks into high gear and the dramatic stakes are too low to be engaging.

Perhaps I’m too cynical, but this show’s underlying premise that the pandemic made Americans more empathetic to others’ perspectives seems patently counterfactual for anyone who can read a newspaper. But in deference to the show’s departing message — “don’t be an asshole” — I’ll end by simply saying I really appreciated Bryn Currie’s realistically rendered set, which made me want to walk up on stage and pour myself a cold one.

Orlando Fringe: Tickets and times for “The Bottleneck Effect”

Event Details

“The Bottleneck Effect”

Wed., May 15, 6:15 p.m., Fri., May 17, 8:45 p.m., Sat., May 18, 5:15 p.m., Mon., May 20, 9:45 p.m., Wed., May 22, 6:30 p.m., Fri., May 24, 9:45 p.m. and Sun., May 26, 1:45 p.m.

A cocaine-snorting King of Rock & Roll and his soft-spoken boyfriend debate coming out of the closet in “Nick & Elvis’s Love Story,” a bizarrely anachronistic playlet by writer/director Julie Henry. With a press preview running time under 15 minutes (less than half the advertised length; apparently some pages got skipped) I’ve already spent more time writing this review than watching the play, but I’m unclear if what little material I witnessed was intended earnestly, or an attempt at deadpan parody.

The “based on true events” script — which completely scrambles the chronology of Elvis’ musical career, military service, and courtship of Priscilla — sounds like it could have been generated by an early-model ChatGPT bot programmed prompted to write ’50s slash fanfic, and the actors (whom I’m not naming for their own protection) do nothing to elevate the writing. The lead makes zero effort to look or sound anything whatsoever like Elvis, and the brief appearance by Col. Tom Parker makes Tom Hanks’ interpretation seem subtle in comparison.

Elvis Presley’s alleged homosexual proclivities have been argued about for decades, but this bite-sized fantasia doesn’t add much to the debate in the way of either dramatic impact or historical accuracy. If you’re a Presley lover looking to honor his memory, I suggest bypassing this heartbreak hotel, because Elvis has left the building.

Nick & Elvis’s Love Story