Let’s Get Weird: Story Hour!! - Let's Get Weird

“Let's Get Weird”, a piece initially devised for the Orlando Fringe by Melanie Bailey with improvised dance assistance from Cristina Ramos, promises a "wild and unpredictable night of fun," overall, it delivers.

Located in the fun and intimate venue at Independence Boulevard Christian Church, this show is high-energy and brimming with promise. The audience is encouraged to bring items from home, which become a part of the storytelling journey. At Saturday's show, the audience picked a miniature Eiffel Tower lamp, a picture of a Holstein cow, a piece of cheese, and an Oscar the Grouch ball, each of which was the centerpiece of one of Melanie's stories.

Melanie owned the space and was comfortable in front of the audience. The play started with a few warm-up Kansas City jokes - somewhat predictable material about Kansas City being in two states, BBQ, questioning the Kansas state motto, and slamming beloved Town Topic. Hopefully, this section will become a bit more fleshed out through the run, as the piece didn't pick up pace until dancer Cristina Ramos did her first routine to "Boss B*tch. " Cristina's commitment, sense of humor, and technical skills were evident, providing many of the show's highlights.

We then alternated between a story and a dance, with Cristina occasionally returning both as a dancer and as an ancillary character in the show. This is when the piece worked best—they played well off each other, and those were the funniest moments of the evening.

The stories seem mostly scripted, and it wasn't easy to tell how much the audience's interactions influenced the show. This was also the big challenge of the piece: with two actresses who are so comfortable in front of an audience; it would have been great to see them interact more with the audience throughout.

“Let's Get Weird” is a fun way to spend an hour. The language and some of the jokes are definitely for mature audiences only, so leave the kids behind for this one, but go see it. Work like this is a perfect example of the type of play, experimentation, exploration, and sense of fun that you can only get at a Fringe performance.