- OTHER MEDIA
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- Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle September11, 2009
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- 3 hits without a miss
- on Fringe opening night
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- The bearded lady may have been the perfect show with which to end my
night at the San Francisco Fringe Festival.
- Billie Cox's thin but pleasant script for "A (Bearded) Lady"
celebrates the freedom and fellowship of the theater, as opposed to the
hypocrisy beyond the freak show. The collaboration between Bay Area playwright-composer
Cox and Brazilian performer Larissa Garcia is a nod to the festival's international
scope. And Garcia packs enough mimetic and vaudeville chops for several
shows.
- Any visit to the Fringe is as much a gamble as a gambol. That's particularly
true on opening night, before word of mouth has begun to build at Exit
Theatre's Fringe Central or through audience reviews on the Web site. My
Wednesday foray turned out pretty well. I could only see three shows, of
the 11 available in three time slots, but none was a disappointment.
- There were even some odd thematic connections. A passing reference
in "(Bearded) Lady" to an embalming fluid that might be "the
same stuff they use to keep your snack foods fresh for years" threw
me back into the first show of the evening, "LandEscape" by Rowena
Richie's Chain Link Friends at the Garage.
- Created and staged by Richie in collaboration with her three co-performers,
based on the industrial-food exposes of Michael Pollan, "LandEscape"
is a blithe and provocative if unfinished, song-and-dance plunge into misleading
food labeling, Monsanto agriculture and our national corn-based diet. None
of the other actors match Richie's dynamism, but the material is eye-opening
and sold with some deft comedy and sharp, energetic dance.
- There's an echo of the egg-producing plaint of Richie's shimmering
Queen Bee in Dark Porch Theatre's "Cockroach" at Exit on Taylor
- though it wouldn't be fair to give away what it is.
- A blend of evocative, nonlinear text by Martin Schwartz and choreography
by director Margery Fairchild, "Cockroach" is a gently unsettling,
gritty probe of the demons in the mind of an unstable homeless man. Nathan
Tucker's intense performance anchors the piece, aided and bedeviled by
Alison Sacha Ross, who also delivers a beguiling rumination on the difference
between a penis and a head of state.
- The outsider status carries over into "(Bearded) Lady," also
at Exit on Taylor. But "Lady" makes the strongest emotional connection
of the three. A solo show as carnival and spiritual release, it takes a
somewhat wobbly flight on the lovely songs by Cox and Garcia's bright embodiment
of a bearded peasant girl's temporary escape into the sanctuary of the
big top.
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