Last Two Fringe Shows
Jul. 30th, 2018 02:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreI did other things this past weekend, but first let me write about the final two fringe shows I saw (both on Friday night), with a quick dinner (veggie bun from Jenny's Asian and gelato from Dolcezza) at the Wharf in between.
An Unhealthy Man Lectures You on Medical Issues: This was Vincent Clark’s one-man show (with some assistance from a silent nurse at various points) about his miserable health. It was a multi-media show, with powerpoint slides and a clip of him performing a song that ran, in part, "I don’t know why / there’s no leg beneath my thigh / diabetes" to the tune of "Stormy Weather." He includes various gruesome details about post-operative complications and calls one drug with nasty side effects "tormentizone." There were some funny lines here and there, but I found a lot of it rather cringy. I think the problem was that it was hard for me to care about him as anyone other than a random sick old man. I needed more context, particularly with respect to the mental health issues (depression and OCD) he mentions more or less in passing. It wasn’t a terrible show, but it could have been a lot better.
Tales of the Mysterious and Grotesque: The Works of Edgar Allen Poe: This was an amalgamation of 7 Poe pieces, some (e.g. The Pit and the Pendulum) more familiar than others (Berenice). It was performed by four young actors. The performances were good, but the show was just oddly put together. Admittedly, I have deeply mixed feelings about Poe to begin with. And I am not crazy about audience participation, though it was actually fairly minimal and more or less avoidable by not sitting in the front row. There was still one person who completely failed to understand what he was being asked to do at one point. Overall, this was interesting, but it just wasn’t my sort of thing. I should note that it didn’t help that it was completely full and I was next to a manspreader who kept shaking the leg that was encroaching on my seat.
An Unhealthy Man Lectures You on Medical Issues: This was Vincent Clark’s one-man show (with some assistance from a silent nurse at various points) about his miserable health. It was a multi-media show, with powerpoint slides and a clip of him performing a song that ran, in part, "I don’t know why / there’s no leg beneath my thigh / diabetes" to the tune of "Stormy Weather." He includes various gruesome details about post-operative complications and calls one drug with nasty side effects "tormentizone." There were some funny lines here and there, but I found a lot of it rather cringy. I think the problem was that it was hard for me to care about him as anyone other than a random sick old man. I needed more context, particularly with respect to the mental health issues (depression and OCD) he mentions more or less in passing. It wasn’t a terrible show, but it could have been a lot better.
Tales of the Mysterious and Grotesque: The Works of Edgar Allen Poe: This was an amalgamation of 7 Poe pieces, some (e.g. The Pit and the Pendulum) more familiar than others (Berenice). It was performed by four young actors. The performances were good, but the show was just oddly put together. Admittedly, I have deeply mixed feelings about Poe to begin with. And I am not crazy about audience participation, though it was actually fairly minimal and more or less avoidable by not sitting in the front row. There was still one person who completely failed to understand what he was being asked to do at one point. Overall, this was interesting, but it just wasn’t my sort of thing. I should note that it didn’t help that it was completely full and I was next to a manspreader who kept shaking the leg that was encroaching on my seat.
