2017 Fringe Festival
All 2017 Shows
All 2017 Reviews
Perennial Fringe favorite Br. John channels Cab Calloway in this year’s offering. The artist is supported by a three-part combo. The music is excellent, as is the original interview-style writing. The choreography leaves something to be desired, but how could it not? It’s a tribute to singer and bandleader Cab Calloway. There is some excellent…
See MoreShari Wassergood gathers together a slew of Kansas City writers and performers for a facetious monologue-review. Laughably paralleling The Vagina Monologues, The Cat Meme-ologues articulate the mental landscapes of some familiar felines– cat memes that have purveyed the internet over the last several years. Audience members who may recognize memes such as ‘IT’S PURFECT” and…
See MoreI’m an 80’s baby and a former “Hip-Hop head”, so I have an immense appreciation for both the origins and the innovations of the rap genre. Cynthia Hardeman and MCStorm’s collaboration, “Sun of the Revolution,” at Phosphor Studio is a classic “oldschool versus new school” story—an intergenerational dialogue remixed. Casting was on point. Treyvon Wainwright…
See MoreShe&Her Productions revived and adapted Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute,” and the result was a show that hits in the gut and the groin. All of the actors were so strong they were unnerving—especially watching Lizzy (Jennifer Coville-Schweigert) grapple with moral responsibility while having no material power at all, as Winifred (Cori Weber) revels in…
See MoreFor those of you who come to the Fringe seeking excellent solo performance, you are in for a treat. Artist and educator Mike Speller offers a carefully adapted and intricately performed show that–much like a favourite campfire tale– will captivate, thrill, and leave you walking away with tendrils of wonder and horror still twined about…
See MoreThere are those who create theater and produce it during KC Fringe, and then there are those who create theater for KC Fringe—Tara Varney is clearly the latter. The crafty festival veteran is back this year with “Variations on a Theme” at Musical Theatre Heritage in Crown Center. In 50 minutes, 4 actors perform 9…
See MoreSome time back, Grant Maloy Smith wrote a song that got him thinking about the Dust Bowl, the multi-year drought that ravaged the midwest during the 1930s. He dug into its history, and over time created an entire album’s worth of songs on the subject. It is this album that forms the core of his…
See MoreVeteran performer Tim Mooney returns to the KC Fringe Festival with another one of his lighting-paced distillations of Shakespeare—this time, the historical tragedy, Julius Caesar. For those not familiar with Mooney’s brand of Shakespeare performance, know that he not only adapts and condenses the play, but scribes helpful and often hilarious expository asides: he narrates…
See MoreSlow Burn Productions presents “Write to Me,” by actor and writer Stephanie Roberts, with musical accompaniment by cellist and composer Alex Williams. What a pleasure, especially if you find yourself thinking that open communication is at risk in this moment of postmodernity, even as new literacies spring up all around us. This show “pushes the…
See MoreLil Theatre Company out of Orlando, FL claims in its tagline, “We make big projects out of lil’ ideas.” With “Clockstoppers”, they have indeed attempted a vast project: a two-person, 60-minute historical survey of late 19th century personages and emerging technology, geographically chaptered from New York to San Francisco via Kansas City, in the format…
See MoreIf abandoned amusement parks have not fully supplanted Victorian mansions as the premier venue for haunting, it is not through lack of trying. There is something about the empty leavings of a place meant for fun, over and above the melancholy of abandoned places in general, that really goes straight for the hindbrain. In WMC…
See MoreIn There Ain’t No More: Death of a Folksinger, Willi Carlisle uses 5 different instruments to tell one interesting story, and he does it all at a dizzying pace. The small stage at Phosphor Studio was strategically littered with props, set pieces, and instruments. From the moment he walked on, Willi Carlisle expertly darted in,…
See MoreThe lights were still out in the Crossroads Arts District as I parked my car, not really knowing what to expect. Cody Clark had agreed to perform at the Phosphor for the night rather than the Outburst down the street because the Phosphor had a generator. Yet, Cody Clark was in his element. A high…
See MoreUsing clowning, aerial silks, and the basic elements of storytelling, Take Flight: An Adventure in Cirque by Chicago’s Byrd Productions Physical Theatre captivates with humor and pathos. Bumbles (Gabriel Faith Howard), Fink (Genesee Spridco), and Kiki (Kathleen Hoil) spin a lovely tale and unfurl simple truths. The venue, City Stage at Union Station, has great…
See MoreBased on his newly published novel, God Bless Cambodia, Randy Ross’s The Chronic Singles’ Handbook offers an enjoyable, occasionally-awkward, but ultimately good-humored narrative of one man’s failures in dating—at home and away. At first, it looks like the show is going to be predominantly travel narratives that bear witness to Ross’s attempts to find the…
See MoreThere are two things to bear in mind when going in to a David Hanson play: that he will play with the roles of player and audience in new and unexpected ways, and that you will never get the whole story from a single performance. In this year’s production, the audience finds itself actively taking…
See MoreComedian Bill Santiago delivers a witty, engaging stand-up show that blends religion, grief-triggered existential musings, and the confounding joy of being father with a layman’s grasp of Quantam Mechanics. He opens with a question, “where do you fit on the spectrum of belief?” only to immeidatley dismiss the query and all possible answers: “I don’t…
See MoreThe Westport Coffeehouse stage is lightly decorated: album covers, a curly wig, a table tennis paddle with a 5 written on one side and a 7 on the other. When Michael Shaeffer walks on—saunters, really—with his curly hair, purple suit and tie and suede shoes, he is instantly likeable. The violet troubadour journeyed all the…
See MoreIn Here Lies Joyland, written by Mitchell J. Ward and directed by Hannah L’Abri Miller, three friends meet in an abandoned theme park for a séance that goes sideways. Part suspense-thriller, part teen drama, think Dawson’s Creek meets Tales from the Crypt. The play opens with H. (Darrington Clark) narrating from the rear of the…
See MoreResist. Resist walls. Resist heteronormativity. Resist any event on your calendar that prevents you from seeing “Walls Suck,” a charming play by Emily Swenson that is enjoying its world premiere during the 2017 KC Fringe Festival. It sings and delivers. Given its title, you would be forgiven for assuming “Walls Suck” is about polyamory. It…
See MoreThe Cult Next Door styles this show as a “#QueerCultHorror loosely inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s Masque of the Red Death”. In fact, it just barely borrows a couple of top-level elements from the Poe work, the rest reading like a sort of cargo-cult Rocky Horror. The show seems to lean mostly on the not-actually-all-that-controversial…
See MoreKzany hails from Yukon, an Oklahoma City suburb best known for Garth Brooks and Grady the Cow, who got stuck up a silo for four days in 1949. Kzany’s offers poetic ruminations on her hometown, love, babysitting, etc, complete with illustrations by the author (Ms Kzany is of the ballpoint-pen-during-home-room school). There are also a…
See MoreI’m not sure quite what I was expecting from Taylor Kay Phillips’ one-woman performance, but what I got was an hour of rapid-fire stand-up autobiography that got the laughs going right from the start and kept them going all through the show. Ms Phillips was born and raised in Kansas City, went off to Harvard,…
See MoreThe Minnesota SkyVault Theatre–the troupe of young people presenting this imaginative condensed version of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona”–have filled their version with rapid-fire gags, physical business, audience interaction, and near-constant music (several performers are multi-instrumentalists). And yet, what may be the most truly unique part of the performance is that they not only allow…
See More