Friday, June 27, 2014

St. Lou Fringe 2014: the Misses

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I have been a big supporter of the St. Lou Fringe festival since its inception three years ago. This year I was out of town for most of the festival’s run (June 18-22), so I only got to six events. Rather than writing a review of each one, I have decided put them into three groups: hits, misses, and flops (a.k.a. “I want my 45 minutes back”). Here are two misses and a flop, in descending order of quality.

Performance: 10; Music: 3: "Terra Camera" with Michael Hagmeier and the Illumine Ensemble – Combine a didgeridoo player in an iridescent hat and black-and-turquoise shirt, a double-reed player in a bright turquoise wig, and a violist in sparkly shoes and what do you get? In the case of "Terra Camera," you get a program of impressive performances of some not-so-impressive music.

The Illumine Ensemble—represented here by Oboe and English horn player Kate Eakin and violist Eliana Haig—is committed to the admirable goal reaching beyond the standard classical repertoire and partnering with musicians and other artists outside of the classical world. So teaming up with multi-instrumentalist Michael Hagmeier (he plays guitar and percussion as well as didgeridoo) makes sense. Unfortunately, most of the music in "Terra Camera" was Mr. Hagmeier's own, and he's a far better performer than he is a composer. There was a repetitive sameness to his music, most of which sounded like Middle Eastern and Balkan folk tunes run through a New Age filter.

So, major points for the concept, the skill with which it was executed, and for Mr. Hagmeir's interesting "Listening to didjeridu [sic] 101," describing how the instrument is played. I had no idea it was so similar to the techniques I learned as a brass player many years ago. But the show would have been better with a wider variety of music.

Interesting Premise: "How I Remember It," written and directed by Tracy Bono – Ms. Bono's memory play is based on the stories she heard from her father. She says she finds them fascinating and perhaps they are, but they play she has assembled from them has a long way to go before it achieves that state. The action jumps back and forth between the present, in which Mature Tony (Alex Saccavino) tells stories of his teen years to his Daughter (Laura Gibbons), who is assembling a family history. They're seated at a table stage right. As Mature Tony begins to reminisce, the lights fade out stage right and come up stage left, where Young Tony (Mike McPartland, looking nothing at all like Mature Tony) acts out the stories involving his wastrel older brother Charlie (Chris Ferguson), his friends Joe and Chutie (Jeremy Hyatt and Jakeb Reynolds) and his mother (Linda Daly).

Not much actually happens and the dramatic stakes are never very high. We learn why Tony never went to college, for example, but as this fact emerges only moments before we discover the reason, no real dramatic tension is built up and, in any case, Tony doesn't seem to care much one way or the other. In addition, all the performances had a kind of flatness and hesitancy that suggested a lack of rehearsal.

Ms. Bono has created some interesting characters, but she hasn't done anything much with them. I had the sense that she simply took some of her father's stories, slightly fictionalized them, and put them on stage, without creating a strong narrative framework for them. It was also not clear where, exactly, the stories were taking place. St. Louis names were dropped often, but the characters, the cadence of their speech, and the overall background seemed more appropriate to a major city like Chicago or New York.

There's the germ of a play here, but more development is clearly called for. File this under "promising, but needs work."

I Want My 45 Minutes Back: "Trial by Jury" with Act Two Theatre – It's common practice to update some of Gilbert and Sullivan's patter songs, replacing Gilbert's contemporary cultural references with ones that will work for a modern audience. For this production of Gilbert and Sullivan's one-act satire "Trial by Jury," though, director Sean Green and music director David Phillips went a bridge (and chorus) too far, dumping about half of Gilbert's lyrics and re-writing, deleting or otherwise significantly altering most of Sullivan's music.

The original operetta uses a civil trial of a breach of promise of marriage suit (a concept that is pretty much a historical relic) as the basis for a sharp satire of the British judicial system. Turning it into a TV courtroom show along the lines of "Judge Judy" isn't a bad idea, but none of Green and Phillips's updates were very skillful. The new lyrics often didn't rhyme or scan and were rarely as funny as the originals, dated or not.

The production also had a slapdash quality that suggested a lack of rehearsal and the range of talent in the cast—both singing and acting—ran the gamut from almost professional to borderline incompetent. At one point early in the show the cast and Mr. Phillips's keyboard seemed to be in different keys.

File this one under "hubris."

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