CityBeat Fringe Coverage 2008

Review: The Dance: The History of American Minstrelsy

In The Dance playwright-actor Jason Christophe White and his actor brother, Aaron White, dig into a difficult, seldom-discussed, hot potato topic — blackface performers and the minstrel shows in which they entertained American audiences for nearly two centuries. Their purpose is twofold and nicely balanced between informing people and entertaining them with a bright, funny show about a form of show business that had its dark corners.

(Photo: John Hutten)

The brothers appear as minstrel clowns in blackface, white gloves, improbable wigs and clothes — all in the manner of traditional “end men” comics, Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo. The show is intricately conceived and staged. They sing, they dance, they tell jokes and strike comic poses — all in the overstated manner of Bones and Tambo — as they move the audience along swiftly through the history lessons:

• Minstrels shows were the first indigenous American form of entertainment.

• From the mid-18th century until the Civil War, minstrel shows featured white men in exaggerated black makeup entertaining white audiences with disparaging stereotypes of blacks as lazy, superstitious buffoons who were musical and always joyously happy.

• Minstrel shows were the conduit through which songwriters could reach American audiences with new songs.

• After 1865 it was illegal in many areas for black artists to entertain white audiences. Black performers often wore blackface to work in vaudeville and revues.

• Professional minstrel shows died out around 1910, but blackface lingered in amateur entertainment and in Hollywood until the middle of the 20th century. The first sound movie, The Jazz Singer (1928), had Al Jolson singing “Mammy” in blackface. Bing Crosby appeared in blackface in Holiday Inn (1942), as did Joan Crawford in a lame 1953 musical called Torch Song.

• Minstrel-like racial stereotyping still goes on in some forms of entertainment to this day.

The Dance is conceived in a stylized manner and, for the most part is executed stylishly. The brothers White believe strongly in their material and work hard at delivering it with punch and passion. Where the show occasionally stumbles it’s because the mechanics of the satire — the exaggerated movement, the loud, aggressive vocal delivery and the stylized posing — get in the way of the meat of the satire.

Technical malfunctions screwed up the last few minutes of the June 1 performance, stealing pace and damping some of the haunting effect of the show’s final, serious moments.

– Tom McElfresh

Review: Giving Up Later

In just his second local show, CCM alum and up-and-coming songwriter Adam Wagner illustrates that while “falling in love” songs are fun, it’s the songs about love lost or missed or needing repair that are the most interesting.

Giving Up Later is a one-act song cycle written by Wagner, arranged by Zachary Dietz and ably performed by a small cast of mostly CCM students. Early publicity materials touted the theme of commitment and how giving oneself to another is essentially giving up future iterations of one’s life, future “laters.” That idea surfaces here and there in the show — sometimes in more pronounced ways than others — but it doesn’t really serve as a through-line. It’s more of a tone or vibe that all the songs have in common and less a literal theme.

(Photo: Kurt Strecker)

In that sense, the show is more demanding and therefore less accessible than Wagner’s previous Fringe entry, 2005’s Don’t Look Down. Written while he was still at CCM, that song cycle had a bubbly effervescence revolving mostly around first love, early love, flirty love. Giving Up Later’s songs mostly don’t have that joy and youthful energy. They tackle weightier issues: dealing with death, growing old with someone and finding the strength to turn the page when a relationship expires. It’s challenging, but in turn the songs are more complex and advanced than his earlier work. In other words, Wagner has grown up as a person and consequently as a songwriter.

Right out of the gate, he and the cast grab the audience with six great tunes. The prologue introduces the cast and its central figure, played by CCM freshman Ryan Breslin. He’s literally the center of the attention onstage and will be the one character carried through from song to song.

With tight harmony, “Walking Against the Wind” showcases the vocal abilities of the cast, and “Falling Forward” displays Wagner’s gifted ability to spin everyday clichés into lyrical treasures. A little funny and a lot sweet, it’s songs like these that manage to be both cute and heartfelt all at the same time. Wagner’s talents are undeniable.

Some old but good material also makes its way into this cycle. “When She Waves First” and “Traci’s Song” were both performed (and were personal favorites) in Don’t Look Down. “Traci’s Song,” particularly, makes for a nice standout moment for Chelsea Barker, who gives just enough to let the audience into the heartbreak but holds enough back to make sure we know her scars are on the inside.

Lori Valentine, former CCMer and local stage veteran, has a similar moment in “No U in Spain,” displaying a wide vocal and emotional range as her character throws herself in an overseas vacation to forget an old flame.

With so many songs spread around, each actor has more than one standout moment. But that also adds up to a slightly bloated run time (about 75 minutes).

The emotional double-punch at the end of the show, “The Angel in the Tow Truck” and “One Bad Choice,” about the central character’s relationship with his father and his need for closure, doesn’t quite land as solidly as you hope. It’s through no fault of the songs or the performances, per se. After almost 20 preceding songs, the show might have taken just a little too long to get to them.

Director Ashton Byrum stages the action as briskly as he can using a very Fringe-y set, dressed with spare tires lying about like at a junk yard or mechanic garage. But there’s a lot of material to plow through. Sometimes the tires were well employed; at others, they just seemed to be used for the sake of it. Regarding the set, patrons should note that the sightlines at New Stage can be difficult. So get there early to claim a good, comfortable chair.

Giving Up Later is a great step forward for a young songwriter. Part of the charm of Fringe Festivals is seeing that next generation of theater stars. Wagner is almost certainly that. One hopes that his next work might better combine the happy, catchy melodies of his first work with the complex, introspective, dramatic tunes heard here. That’s a combination to look forward to. Later.

– Rodger Pille

Review: Car/Street

Car/Street is exactly the kind of performance one would expect to see in a Fringe Festival, even though by now the show has closed (it was a one-night-only run): On blocked off Jackson Street (in front of The Know Theatre) in Over-the-Rhine, a good-sized crowd stood on a sidewalk and watched cars, pedestrians and bikers pass by, re-creating a “living streetscape.” For 25 minutes or so, this was what happened. But then there was more: Audience members begin to interact with each other; neighborhood children joined in, yelling “Hey!” back at the pedestrian cast members; passersby stopped to see what’s going on.

This was local artist Andy Marko’s point in creating this piece: Human dramas exist everywhere — but are better observed in an urban environment — and people need people.

The “car performance art” began with a couple leisurely walking their dog down the street, and then a car, out of sight, repeatedly blowing its horn. “When they honk at me, I flip them off to tell them not to honk,” said the woman next to me to her neighbor, adding something about the “ghetto.” (I’d like to think she was part of the show.) Meanwhile, nine different cars of various manufacturers and status symbols floored it down the block — or cruised, tailed bikers, held up traffic while blaring the radio (which just happens to air an auto insurance commercial), played chicken and tried to park — while a tired-looking man pushed a grocery cart and wiped his brow, and a woman walked by looking for something up in a tree.

It was interesting to see how the performance artists interacted with each other, but even more so was observing the audience’s reaction to this series of events. People get a little uncomfortable when a car stops in the street for no apparent reason. The same applies when a car entered a street going the wrong way and another one was coming in the opposite direction.

Neighborhood kids hung on the parking lot fence, watching the audience watch them. “Do it again! Yay!” they yelled, before they’re summoned inside for bed. In between “scenes,” attendees, who were almost stretched down the whole block, looked right and left, exchanging looks with one another in anticipation. As strange as it sounds, it was exciting to stand on this street and watch these cars.

– Jessica Canterbury

Review: UnMasked: Curt … from Detox

Critic’s Pick

Curtis Shepard is an ingenious actor. He’s to be remembered from performances with Children’s Theater, at the Arts Consortium, at the Museum Center and on other Cincinnati stages. But as he demonstrates in UnMasked, he is also an ingenious and energizing writer. He has that rare playwright’s knack for imagining a character, then arranging a spare dozen or two words that, when spoken, will ignite into a portrait. Not a caricature, mind you. Not a sketch or a type. A multi-dimensional character.

When actor Shepard takes over from writer Shepard, he adds a gesture or two, a signature tone of voice, a characterizing mannerism, and in nanoseconds there stands an individual zinging with energy, ready and able to lay some ideas on you and just as able to ask and deserve your attention.

Shepard says that everyone in the world possesses a very precious thing: his or her story. And they have two serious responsibilities: To live their stories and to tell their stories. A dozen or more times during his 60-minute unmasking he turns his back briefly and steps around a plastic lawn chair that in the only thing on the platform with him. When he turns back, somebody different is standing there, already plunging into the middle of his story. No preambles or reasons why. No scene-setting or excess exposition. You don’t hear many names or dates or much about background. Suddenly you’re up close and personal with someone you’ve never met, someone who immediately begins unmasking.

There’s a rapping hipster, but his rap is not stagy; it’s a natural manner of expression with him. Rhymed, rhythmic lines swim organically inside longer, unrhymed speeches. There’s a brain-damaged child with a talent for friendship — and for irritation. And there’s a wonderstruck dude who wakes up in a long white hallway with no doors and a floor of shining solid gold — shiny like, he tells us, a friend’s gold tooth when it was new. Sincere comedy and deep stress play equal parts in is his unmasking as he sorts out where he is.

Interviewed before the Fringe, Shepard said that the audience’s takeaway from his show should be that, “Everybody wears a mask; it’s important that we take them off and discover that we’re all the same and we all want to be loved and accepted and respected.”

In his 60-minute show Shepard unmasks eight distinct individuals, some rather fully, some less so — like an astonishing “little person” with the prominent breasts and the equally prominent mustache. Then, in a sudden finale that’s both startling and moving, he helps you realize that all along he’s been removing layers of masks from himself and, at the end, there stands Curtis, ready to be respected.

— Tom McElfresh

Review: The Attack of the Big Angry Booty

The use of comedy in treating difficult subjects in theater can be an effective tool for connecting with audiences that might resist such topics as entertainment. Recent plays on the subject of cancer such as Margaret Edson’s Wit and Tania L. Katan’s play about breast cancer, Stages, adroitly use laughter to make such topics more inviting. Plays such as these entertain while they inform. Les Kurkendaal’s 2008 one-man Fringe show, The Attack of the Big Angry Booty, applies humor to the anxieties and health problems stemming from being overweight.

The Los-Angeles based performer is a writer, storyteller and comedian. But to keep bone and sinew together, he tells the audience at Below Zero Lounge that he has had to take a lot of jobs outside show biz. One has been working for Jenny Craig, the weight loss program. His 60-minute show interweaves some of the weight struggles of Craig clients in addition to autobiographical detailing of his own anxious relationship with the scale as he tried to lose 20 pounds.

Kurkendaal, who looks splendid now that his Taco Bell excursions are under control, introduces a gallery of characters in his storytelling style. Sue, who wants to lose weight to improve her sex life; Jill is puzzled as to why her “salad” diet fails to improve results when she climbs onto the scale. Kurkendaal solves that mystery with some hilarity. A competitive mother and daughter try to lose weight together. But their conflicts connote deeper psychological hostilities with each other.

Meanwhile, Kurkendaal explores his own weight struggles that include the temptations of overeating while performing on the road, the trance-like loss of willpower at Taco Bell and self-deprecating remarks about his physical appearance. His self-commentary includes paranoia about something that seems to be following him when he looks into a mirror nude. Just what his stalker happens to be is a funny revelation.

Basically, Kurkendaal’s mix of the personal with the Craig vignettes is a workable idea. The problems that keep his show from achieving its potential go to structure not material. The better forms of storytelling have what the theater calls an “arc,” that is, a structure that moves from exposition to some sort of crescendo to resolution (or at least insight or perspective).

Kurkendaal’s weight loss account is a journey. At the outset, he profiles overeaters and finally identifies the type of eater he is. But unfolding his experience eventually proves redundant. He keeps getting off and on a chair that serves as a scale. Its readings cause a repetition of frustration/accomplishment/frustration and so on. If the ups and downs of the scale do reflect the essence of his weight battles, then he needs to edit the material. We get it after three or four weigh-ins.

The greater disappointment in the show is the client stories. Some of the people Kurkendaal re-creates, using different voices and mannerisms, really are quite interesting portraits, such as a woman who comes to Jenny Craig who is not overweight.

The show would be more involving if some of these client stories were more developed. As it stands, he really does little more than cataloguing. When a character is introduced, interest is barely established before we return to Kurkendaal’s scale for more ponderings on his poundage. This show about being overweight is anorexic when it comes to substance.

— Jerry Stein

Review: Inner:City

The Fringe-iest walking tour you’re ever likely to put shoe to pavement with comes by way of Inner:City Tours and is called just that: Inner:City. When I took it on Sunday, street life was languid in the afternoon sun, but the stories that came through my ear buds were plenty lively. Bring your own iPod to download this podcast-guided tour or if, like me, you’re not up to speed in the technological department, borrow one of the limited-supply of loaners. Inner:City will be offered only one more day, June 7, at 1, 1:30, 2 and 2:30 p.m., leaving from Know Theatre Underground.

The mix of history and fun and What’s Up Now makes for a few surprises along the way. Allow an hour-and-a-half to two hours, with some sit-down time at the Coffee Emporium, to take a look at an area where history and fun and new stuff are all mixed up anyway.

The taped Voice talking directly to the iPod listener purports to tell you things she might not tell her best friend — a story about her grandmother, her great-grandmother and the Germania building that, if true, would suggest the cheerful, young-sounding, slightly flirty voice belongs to someone pushing 60, if you do the math. Don’t do the math; you’re here to have fun.

Some of the material shades into urban legend. The deep basement of a one-time theater on Vine Street leads to talk of underground apartments and passages the Voice hasn’t actually seen herself but hears rumors about. There are other embellishments: the iPod listener is told about the Voice’s boss, who just doesn’t get it, and the listener might play a part in a little street theater. There are repeated admonitions from the Voice to be careful and a pretended scuttling of a section of the tour “for safety issues.” This is, I suppose, meant to add excitement to the venture, but seems to me irresponsible. Some people might use the Fringe to explore a neighborhood they are slightly afraid of anyway. This kind of talk only underlines their concerns.

It’s pretty interesting in Over-the-Rhine without tarting things up. Something not mentioned by the Voice was a piece of careful graffiti, high on a building on 13th Street, a message painted as though on a television screen, “Every moment we’re creating our future.” Yep. Something to think about when surrounded by the past and listening to an iPod, as in Inner:City.

— Jane Durrell

Review: Oatmeal and a Cigarette

Critic’s Pick

The set for Oatmeal and a Cigarette incorporates more afghans than you could shake a knitting needle at, and pretty soon we know why. Doting big brother Claire, who has been raising Billy for 27 years and answers to “Mommie,” knits in the evenings. Knits enough security blankets for a regiment.

The premise here — Billy is 30 but thinks he’s 3 — is open to plenty of cheap laughs but the script and the cast sidestep temptation. As Billy, Daniel J. Kiely uses his considerable bulk to terrific effect; dread locks and beard only setting off his open face where expressions as pure as primary colors come and go. Claire (Karl Gregory) and Babysitter Jane (Madeline Maher) are in what is at first an unspoken rivalry for Billy’s trust. The competition quickly becomes not only verbal but also loud. Both need Billy to complete their visions of themselves. Claire’s seeing himself as Mommie might stem from a mother who decamped; Babysitter (and graduate student) Jane needs him for the practical purpose of her thesis. Billy is her subject, publication her object, and removal of Billy from what she sees as an unhealthy environment a collateral issue.

Sex is the wild card, of course. Billy’s sexuality. Even for someone who thinks he’s 3, those post-puberty urges come along. Babysitter Jane faces more than she bargained for.

This play, sharp and together and headed inexorably down its road, reached finished form through group action by Bad Dog! Productions of Ithaca, N.Y. The three actors, playwright and director George Sapio (founder of Bad Dog!) and Melissa Thompson, stage manager and Sapio’s co-director, took the idea of Billy and played with it through “improvisation, character games, acting exercises, until the characters and story started to show,” Sapio says. Then he began to write, with continual input from his collaborators.

This is ensemble work ticking along at high speed, with results that are extremely funny and surprisingly moving. All three cast members inhabit their parts as though they lived them, and the pace of the show is just right. Throw in a great imitation of a lawn mower and a tooth-brushing scene that touches the heart, and you have Oatmeal and a Cigarette.

A minor quibble: Karl Gregory looks way too young to be Daniel J. Kiely’s older brother and must have taken over supplying his oatmeal at the age of 2. But that’s not vital. Suspension of disbelief is what theater is all about.

— Jane Durrell