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Best bets at the Rochester Fringe Fest
The inaugural First Niagara Fringe Festival will feature more than 100 shows at 20-plus venues over five days, September 19-23. It’s a staggering grouping of arts and cultural opportunities, and it can be difficult to know where to start. City Newspaper’s chief cultural critics have combed through the schedule and picked out their “best bets” for the festival; you’ll find them below. But these are just a smattering of the events going on throughout the festival. Go through the full festival guide, also included in this issue of City, or find the full schedule at rochesterfringe.com. Find out what looks interesting to you and make your own Fringe. During the festival, head to rochestercitynewspaper.com for our critics’ daily dispatches at the Entertainment Blog. We’ll have reviews, more previews, and our thoughts on what shows are the best of the fest. Make sure to leave your own reviews in the comments section.
Michael Lasser’s Picks
One review of “The Bicycle Men” called it “a genial spoof.” So is this going to be one of those things that’s much funnier when you’re having a fourth beer with friends and making up a musical at 3 in the morning? But a naïve Yank who gets stuck while biking through France also conjures up the possibility of a demented Henry James (though without anything resembling a sense of humor). If the play’s oddball characters and surreal puppets avoid the trap of self-consciousness, this silly musical could be a treat. The Fringe says it’s appropriate for ages 16 and up. (Wednesday 9/19 8:30-9:30 p.m., Thursday 9/20 6-7 p.m., Friday 9/21 7:308:30 p.m., and Saturday 9/22 1:30-2:30 p.m. at Geva Theatre Nextstage. Tickets cost $15.) When “Casey Jones Costello Sings the Great American Songbook,” audiences will encounter a college student who looks even younger than his years, but who sings these songs his grandparents still know with affection and sincerity. His voice is pleasant and his singing style unadorned. You will also understand every single word in these incomparable songs of sentiment and wit by such masters of the craft as Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Yip Harburg, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and Johnny Mercer. This may be one of the few Fringe performances where simple honest sentiment prevails. (Friday 9/21 5-6 p.m. and Saturday 9/22 7-8 p.m. at Java’s. Free admission.) The ancient Sumerian epic “Gilgamesh” includes a Flood story that predated and influenced the Old Testament’s Noah story. More importantly, it is one of the first tragic tales in which a king worthy of his quest seeks immortality and, of course, fails. The gods toy with him as they do with all humans. Into that world struts a single 21st century actor playing nearly two dozen parts with his sense of irony intact. “Charlie Bethel’s Gilgamesh” offers up a jaundiced take on one of the humankind’s most extraordinary sagas. (Saturday 9/22 3 p.m. and Sunday 9/23 8 p.m. at Geva Theatre Nextstage. Tickets cost $15.) Don’t yawn, don’t shift in your seat, don’t
[ PREVIEW ] BY CITY FEATURES STAFF
like this anymore! (Saturday 9/22 2 p.m. and Sunday 9/23 12:30 p.m. at RAPA’s East End Theatre. Tickets cost $5-$10.) “Love at First Waltz” (a sublime title that has already got me swaying) brings together BIODANCE, a locally based modern-dance company, and Resonanz, a 40-voice touring choir from within the Rochester Oratorio Society. In the middle of the 19th century, the waltz was controversial; in the early 20th, syncopation (by way of ragtime) was equally raffish. But each soon became the defining popular music of its time. Their composers — Johannes Brahms, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and more — started on the fringe but we moved them into the mainstream. One of the music’s natural habitats is a cabaret, and so it will be here. (Sunday 9/23 6:30-7:30 p.m. at RAPA’s East End Theatre. Tickets cost $8-$12.)
Rebecca Rafferty’s Picks
Flower City Vaudeville PHOTO PROVIDED
even goddam blink, because you might miss an entire play from “44 Plays for 44 Presidents.” Each president beginning with George — and including Zachary, Millard, Ulysses, Rutherford, Chester, Calvin, and Barack — is the subject of a two-minute play. Like a lot of the presentations in the Fringe Festival, this one is also self-billed as “hilarious” and “irreverent.” The performers are young professionals from the Geva Theatre Conservatory. (Saturday 9/22 8-10 p.m. and Sunday 9/23 3-5 p.m. at Geva Theatre Nextstage. Ticket cost $15.) Vaudeville was the most important form of American show business until the Great Depression, Talkies, and radio combined to bury it in the 1930’s. Until then, every town big enough to have a theater had daily eight-act bills featuring everything from animal acts to comics to song-and-dance men. A touring star like Nora Bayes or Sophie Tucker would come to town for a week and take an entire floor of the best hotel. “Flower City Vaudeville,” a local troupe, emphasizes the novelty acts and the comedy, rather than the songs and the soft shoe. It appears to be vaudeville with a smattering of circus tossed in, but how do you resist people who ride a unicycle, juggle, and play the washboard? They don’t do show biz
There are some unknowns in human existence that might never be answered. But that doesn’t mean we won’t eternally ask questions about our purpose (or lack thereof), the nature of death, and the slippery slope of human cognition. Core Project Chicago’s “The Dust” will explore these themes of death, fate, memory, and man through dance, poetry, experimental music, and visual art. The performance is recommended for all ages. (Sunday 9/23 5-6 p.m. at RAPA’s East End Theatre. Tickets cost $8-$10. A free workshop for ages 14+ will take place Friday 9/21 7:45 p.m. For more information, visit rapatheatre.org.) Ever wonder what would happen if two unlikely people from history met up? No time machine is required to rewrite history in the play, “Howard & Emily,” because the title characters connect post-mortem. The shades of pseudo-morbid Emily Dickinson and arcane-obsessed Howard Philips (H.P.) Lovecraft share the stage, unaware of each other at first, their lines comprised of quotes from their writings and letters, before the two eventually fall in love to the sweet serenade of period music. Add one Doktor Bronislaw Kielbasa-Funk, a Polish acolyte of Freud who has fallen into ill-repute, and whose life is severely altered by what he witnesses. Recommended for ages 15 and older. (Friday 9/21 8-9 p.m. and Saturday 9/22 4-5 p.m. at Writers & Books. Tickets cost $10.) RIT’s visual arts will be represented throughout Fringe at various locations, including Gallery r (100 College Ave.), where you can view Cat Ashworth’s video installation, “Bee Eye.” Visitors may enter the hexagonshaped structure and be immersed in the sights and sounds of the honeybee, and explore the artist’s perspective on the fragile and crucial
Lost in the Funhouse: Revolution PHOTO PROVIDED
honeybee-human relationship. While there, check out the showcase of works by RIT undergraduates and graduate students from RIT’s College of Imaging Arts and Sciences, many of which are interactive and encourage audience participation. And at the Little Theatre Café (240 East Ave.), visitors can view a showcase of CIAS alum works in the fine arts, illustration, and photography. (All shows are free and take place throughout the Fringe Festival, and are recommended for all ages.) Does your shirt just sit there on your back, keeping you warm and presentable, but otherwise bored? Should we expect a little bit more? I mean, this is the future, right? On Friday, The Little Theatre will host RIT’s Wearable Technology Show, which will feature the convergence of aesthetics and technology in surprising and silly ways. Learn what flying birds, fireflies, invisibility, and blinking lights have to do with adornments. RIT student creators will be on hand to explain the technology and answer questions from the audience. (Friday 9/21 6-6:45 p.m. at Little 1. Admission is free.) The title of Rochester Museum and Science Center’s artsy presentation about the passage of time, “Lost in the Funhouse: Revolution,” calls up images of tripping clumsily through cosmos and this confounding existence. I’m intrigued by the promise of projected planetarium star maps and videos, live computer music, field recordings, and spoken words, all combined to discuss how the shifting of seasons, solar and lunar cycles, and celestial mechanics affects us physically and psychologically. (Thursday 9/20 6-7 p.m., Saturday 9/22 8-9 p.m., Sunday 9/23 6-7 p.m. at RMSC’s Strasenburgh Planetarium. Admission is $8, program is recommended for ages 5+.) RIT is practically dominating the visual-arts aspect of the Fringe Festival, and on Saturday, members of the institute’s community will take over the surface of a downtown church. RIT continues on page 20
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