When I walked into the Zephyr theatre on Melrose, I had no idea I would be spending the next two hours with the family Escajeda. The play is a love letter to El Paso, but doesn’t shy away from real-world politics and fears and the tragic Walmart shooting. Before the play began, the audience was treated to putting a face to the director and writer of the play, Desiree Marisol Carcamo. She was friendly and gave us a brief message before the show began. I noticed a tone of seriousness and of depth behind those smiling eyes. It was an omen of what was to come.

The direction of the play was cleverly staged so that exits and entrances felt as natural as walking around your own house. The couch was where the “high school dropout,” portrayed by the infectiously sweet Alan Borunda, played his video games. The kitchen was the domain of the mom who “cares so much,” played by the charismatic Linzy Beltran. The dining room table was occupied by the daughter who “dreams to be an artist” with a fiery determination played by Maria de Los Angeles. Together, these three bring us a reality of family life that brought me back home.

The writing is the true standout in this play. Each character had a few solo moments to tell us, the audience, a bit of background, but also supplied some exposition of what was to come. It never feels like we are being fed information in order to further the plot. Rather, Miss Caramo respects her audience completely and gives us insights into the dynamics of familial discomforts, secrets, and resolutions. As a director, Miss Caramo allows her actors to move freely about the stage without pretense or busy work. Each character shines, gets angry, and makes mistakes, just like a real family. As if that wasn’t enough, when the mom makes a grocery run to the local Walmart, we all held our breaths hoping the worst was not an inevitability.

As the house lights went up and I tried to brush off the tears that surprised me, I picked up the postcard of the show and realized that this play was making its debut at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Such a play to debut at a venue such as this, all I could think of was what a bright future the director/writer and the three actors have before them. Viva El Paso.

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“Shagadelic: The Origins of Slang Words for Doing It” is an absolutely hilarious and brilliantly clever solo show written and performed by the rather sublime Mike Blaha.  If you have ever wondered where ‘shag’ or ‘boink’ or ‘hiding the sausage’ originates…then this is your kind of play. 

Our guide on this academic journey through the language of the etymology of onanistic euphemisms is the learned Professor Fondler who has been assigned the dubious task of lecturing on this newly created college course. We are his students and, even though the audience is well over the average college age, the sniggering, tittering and general adolescent behaviour abounds and adds hugely to the enjoyment of this highly entertaining and wonderfully written show.

It put me in mind of the very best British sketch comedy. Particularly The Secret Policemen’s Ball, which I’m not even sure is still a thing, or like Black Adder or The Young Ones. Writers such as Ben Elton, Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and the like…that odd kind of awkward ironic humor that the English do so well. Full of hidden jokes, cutting asides and a general undercurrent of anger and revenge…how fabulous!

This particular professor wanders of his topic from time to time, making badly veiled references to his recently cuckolded wife and the sad sack she is apparently shtupping.  Mike Blaha makes for a riveting and remarkably believable Professor Fondler. The slight stoop, the tweed jacket, the moth-eaten bow tie. As his mind wanders while reciting the colloquial terms for a member, you can catch the slight sadness in his delivery. Anger tinged with regret, humiliation born by resignation to his fate. It’s truly delicious. 

Funny, frighteningly informative and a joyful jaunt down the memory lane of smut and scandal. I absolutely loved it. Definitely one of the highlights of the Hollywood Fringe for me.

I believe “Shagadelic” is Edinburgh bound. And I am absolutely positive that the Scotts will be utterly thrilled!

When:

Encore performance on Saturday, July 22, 8:30pm

Where:

Asylum @ Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre (SFS Theatre mainstage)

5636 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9829?tab=tickets

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“Now or Later” is a political drama, although the drama itself has little to do with politics. At least it should have little to do with it. But lately, the smallest detail about our private lives can be made political. In this case, it revolves around the son of the latest American president on the eve of his election. Photographs of the young man in question have just been published of him dressed in a makeshift phony Muslim costume with a friend dressed as an evangelical priest at a late-night party on his college campus.  What was a badly thought-through commentary on free speech has now become something entirely different and threatens to mar his father’s triumphant night.

None of this has anything to do with his sexuality of course, but one cannot help but imagine that it will, given that he is gay.  It will, no doubt, become an annoying tagline in the press and retched ammunition in the hands of the GOP.

It’s a fascinating ‘moment in history’ play. The performances hinge on the riveting dialog and the urgency of every second as the story unfolds.  Each actor has their purpose. The son to disrupt. The mother to placate. The friend to witness. The Chief of Staff to manage, the campaign manager to cajole, and the father to react. It’s all very Shakespearean. And with that, we are all a witness, along with the quiet liberal, even-toned friend, as the son does his best to find his own interpretation of his long ago inflicted role in the history of his father. 

Brilliant writing and excellent performances in a play more relevant than ever. These politicians spend their lives trying to get elected only to spend the next four years trying to get reelected and to not be destroyed in the press. Like zombie mayflies, the process is more important than the moments in the sun. Good grief things need to change. 

This production is excellent. Balanced, poised performances. Powerful, spacious direction. The result is a thoughtful version of this masterful play. The Matrix is also a wonderful venue for this, the stage cinema-like and the history of the place profoundly right for this playwright and his work.

I highly recommend “Now or Later.”  Since the Hollywood Fringe is fleeting there are only a couple more nights to catch this…so don’t dawdle!

The Cast and Team:

Cherish Monique Duke, Brendan Farrell, Suzanne Ford, Samuel Garnett, George Kappaz, and Jack McKeever. 

The scenic design is by Barbara Kallir, graphic design is by Carra Yoder, and assistant director is Raquel Berney Needleman. 

When:

Saturday 6/24 at 1pm & 4pm, Sunday 6/25 at 2pm

Where:

The Matrix Theatre

7657 Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90046

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9955

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This is such a fascinating play. It begins with an ending. A string quartet has lost its founding member to cancer. As they gather for one final performance together to honor their fallen leader they are faced with a quandary. Their megalomaniac manager has brought them a replacement lead violinist. He believes he has an ironclad contract and has every right to make them keep performing. Unbeknownst to the group, he has lost all his other clients and is on the edge of financial ruin. So the quartet is quite literally everything to him. Still raw from the death of their beloved leader, they stumble on and with a new young violinist they begin to see a future, new life in the old team…but that is where it all gets even more difficult.

Sometimes success can feel like a betrayal and this is one of those times. 

At its heart this is a melodrama.  But it’s also a very intimate portrait of how musicians live.  Barely surviving on their portion of the take from Bar Mitzvahs and weddings and gallery openings, they eek out a living, trying to make it through another year without resorting to a proper job.  In the end though, many have to choose between the music and a life.

“Four” is a glorious play, truly. The performances are lovely, truthful and interesting. Some of the music is live. Some is not, but the blend works and the entire performance is played out as if they are onstage or in rehearsal, which is perhaps where these musicians live the most. With their instruments in their hands.  I loved it. Bravo for bringing something totally different to Fringe and for making it feel so real.  

I hear this is on its way to The Edinburgh Festival! So, unless you are planning a trip, get your tickets now for “Four.”

Only two more performances!!

When:

Remaining shows: Thursday, June 22 @ 9:30 p.m. and Saturday, June 24 @ 5:30 p.m.

Where:

The Broadwater Theatre

6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9825?tab=tickets

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Melia Mills is a gifted storyteller. An Oakland native, she has created a semi-autobiographical account of a young girl, “Melia,” growing up in an affluent neighborhood with supportive loving parents whose only dream is to be ‘thug.’  

Melia is a sweet kid though. Thoughtful, kind, and a good student, but her daily prayers to Tupac, her poetry writing, and her yearning to rap is making this 15-year-old picked upon. It’s making a good girl turn bad…or at least naughty enough to sneak out of her parents’ house and enter the local girl’s rap competition.  And the rest, as they say, is history.

This is an absolutely brilliant show and Melia Mills is a Hollywood Fringe breakout star…no question. She is incredibly funny, utterly original and fearless. The play is beautifully written, the timing priceless and the music fly!

Is that the right word???  I don’t know, but I do know that “The Allure of Thug Life” has got to be a best of the fest!

Melia holds the audience in the palm of her hand as she relives these events and plays every character from her dad to her school bully to perfection. The audience was literally on their feet for her and she deserves it! Solo shows are hard to do, and I have seen enough of them to know someone special when I see her. There’s just so much to this show. It’s heartfelt, poignant and important enough to Melia that she felt moved to share her story. Which makes it the perfect fodder for Fringe.

The best stories are the most personal, but they don’t have to be heartbreaking. And although the ending of “The Allure of Thug Life” is surprisingly intense, it’s iconic, at least to Melia’s story. And she puts her own very special twist to it and brings the house down.

Melia Mills has a big career ahead of her as a writer and a performer. She’s an original and I’m so glad I got to catch her on her way up!…don’t miss this!!

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9618?tab=tickets

When:

Final Show – Friday June 23, 5:30pm

Where:

905 Cole Theatre

905 Cole Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90038

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What better way to experience Sherlock Holmes than in the presence of the man himself?  This brilliant play has been developed over the years by the writer, David Stuart Davies. Pulling from his lifetime’s work of research and catalog, he writes Sherlock Holmes as instinctively as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself I wager.  In this electric piece, we see the man toward the end of his life. Called to London for the funeral of his beloved Watson, slightly dulled by years of cocaine and hiding away in Sussex. We see him now still vital and fascinated by life, although he is regretful and haunted by some of his cases.

Sherlock Holmes is such a part of the English culture that he seems real. I wonder how many people think he actually was, rather than a figment of Conan Doyle’s vivid imagination. A tortured soul, nonetheless this play gives him to us at his best I think. Older, slightly wiser, quicker to emotion and full of the wisdom of repentance.  

It’s a truly heartbreaking piece and I found myself tearing up many times. Perhaps it reminded me of my father, perhaps of my home in England, perhaps of the deerstalker hat that sits beside me in the bookcase as I write. How intrinsic is this man in all our lives? I know he is so much a part of mine that he feels like family. Nigel Miles-Thomas performs as Holmes with magical candor. He has that mysterious ability some actors have to occupy the mantle of a character so completely that they become inexorably connected. He and Holmes seem utterly indivisible from one another. And the portrayal is as close to my imagined Sherlock Holmes as anyone I have seen in the role. 

He talks and he talks and he misses everything. But mostly he misses Watson. The love of his life it seems. And weren’t they the perfect pair? Sherlock was inspired by Watson’s writings of their adventures together. Always searching for approval and a better title for his next story…

It seems impossible that they were the only characters in a book. And yet, how perfect that they will live forever there…together.

This is a brilliant piece of Hollywood Fringe Festival theatre. Unmissable in fact. Nigel Miles-Thomas is fantastic as Sherlock. He has the energy of him, the fierceness, the intellect, the passion. I absolutely loved this performance and the writing! Wow…the words are perfectly written and perfectly spoken.

There are three more performances so you really have no excuse not to see this phenomenal show. I think I will be back myself!! In fact, I know I will. How can I miss the prospect of another evening with Sherlock Holmes?

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9759?tab=tickets

When:

Final Shows: Wednesday, June 21 @ 8pm, Friday, June 23 @ 9pm, Saturday, June 24 @ 7pm

Where:

The Broadwater

6320 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90038

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Am I a “Ringer?” A “Tolkienite” perhaps? I’m not sure what the correct term is but I am a fan. Of them all. During Covid I had the totally unnecessary excuse to sit and watch all the “Lord of The Rings” films in chronological order once again and would it be obtuse of me to say I was secretly loving the lockdown? 

Riley Smith is obviously also a huge fan and probably has seen the films a few more times than even I, considering his word-for-word reenactment of the first 30 minutes or so of the very first of Sir Peter Jackson’s opus. I’m not sure that Mr Jackson is an actual Knight…but if anyone should be. 

So this perfect Hollywood Fringe Festival play is just Riley on stage, wearing his hobbit outfit, taking us moment by moment, frame by literal frame, through the film. Beginning at the very beginning…the credits and as he mimics the New Line Cinema ladders whistling passed his head to form their signature logo, you can tell that this is no ordinary man and no ordinary retelling.

With the eager help of his audience cheering him on and joining in when he hums or la’s the gorgeous and heart-rending music, Riley Smith scurries across the stage playing every character, repeating every timeless line and tossing the ring about like nobody’s business.  He is absolutely astonishing and I will be forever grateful that he reminded me I am not alone in my deep love of these wonderful films.

Sweaty and slightly burpy…I think he ate his second dinner a little too fast. Riley Smith mesmerized his audience and was rewarded not with eternal life and the power to vanish at will perhaps, but with something more valuable I think, raucous cheering and applause and true appreciation of his immense effort and the joy it brought us all.

“Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring-Extended Edition Part 1” has only two remaining performances and I urge you to make the time to see this utterly brilliant play!

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9715?tab=tickets

When:

Wednesday, June 21 at 8:00 pm and Saturday, June 24 at Midnight

Where:

The Broadwater

1078 Lillian Way, Los Angeles, CA 90038

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9715?tab=tickets

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What a wonderful celebration of female power! “Yoni Ki Kahaniya” or “Vagina Stories” is a collection of experiences and anecdotes from the minds and hearts of five extraordinary and beautiful Asian women. Although their culture casts a large shadow on their individual stories, as any woman would know, being female is in and of itself a lens through which the world is seen, sometimes with little glory.  But these particular stories are theirs, and so it goes that because of their places of birth, or family origins, these stories are cast with the color of their skin and the traditions of their worlds fully in mind.

But the stories alone are not the only link between them. And the play is performed as a united affair. Each act given to each performer, but intermixed with that, very cleverly I may add, is a series of sojourns, routines, or transitions that entertain with hilarious reenactments of birth, or the huge variety of vagina rituals such as waxing or shaving or early attempts at masturbation.  It’s all very funny and coy and so sweetly done that we forget for a while about the seriousness of being a person with a vagina.  The darkness that envelopes when abuse begins. The shame that is worn veil like throughout our lives, eroding our self confidence and our personhood. And how society and politics and religion are so often the abusers instead of the protectors of us.

All these subjects are touched upon and it reminds us just how many of us have been a victim at one time or another. Although, with that reminder comes the comfort of sorts that we are not alone.  Being female, or a person with a vagina comes with benefits too. Frankly, I would always choose to be a woman. Even as a child climbing trees and sailing boats and fishing with my father I never once even pretended to be male. Perhaps that says more about my father than myself.  But I do love having a vagina! And all these fascinating, intelligent and gorgeous women make me all the more sure I am right.

I loved this play. And sitting in amongst a very mixed audience of men and women and most definitely everything in between and beyond, I can tell you I was far from alone. Applause for days is I think the phrase. And we all stood in human unison to award these wonderful women our thanks for their stories and their honesty and their love.

I hope “Yoni Ki Kahaniya (#YKK): Vagina Stories” gets an extension! I know so many people who would love this show!!!

And my “Yoni” thanks Sharmita Bhattacharya, Chhaya Nene, Sapna Kumar, Vee Kumari and Tanya Thomas, Vee Kumari, Jessica Lynn Johnson and Marianne Davis for their wisdom, their art, and their glorious voices in our world. Bravo!!

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Elena Rosa is an artist as well as an actor. The play, “How to be an Ending,” reflects the nuance of that. It’s a performance piece. Each scene within the whole like a movement in an orchestration. The themes are constant -, escape, fear, regret, pain – but the lenses change. One is a pregnant girl, barely old enough to be considered more than a child, worried that her baby would be taken from her. A trucker in a bad relationship trying to move forward. A further assortment of disparate souls all trying to make sense of their lives, few succeeding. 

Darkness seems to follow them and as Elena skilfully navigates the stage, the stories, and her own connection to them, we see a pattern emerge slowly.  There is a lot of darkness here. A lot of hopelessness, but also poetry. “How to be an Ending” is a journey through lives some of us may have never seen, some of us have lived and all of us can understand when shown them as intimately and with such compassion as this. 

Elena Rosa connects to these people as urgently as she connects to her audience. Like a child, she both ignores and seems to climb inside us. She feels the gaze of those around her and also is beyond it somehow. I think that’s the artist in her. What she makes is really much more about her than about us. The fine line between theatre and art then is what is presented and what is created. 

I loved it. But then after so many plays that are for us, “How To Be an Ending” felt like a play for her…or even, for them.  It’s powerful and mesmerizing and poignant and the utter opposite of contrived. Perfect Hollywood Fringe.

With just one performance left, you should book your tickets!!

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9927?tab=tickets

When:

Saturday, June 24 at 1:00 p.m.

Where:

The Hudson Theatre

6539 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90038

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I love Chekov. Hilarious, poignant, ironic, deeply sarcastic and achingly sincere. His plays are timeless and effortlessly brilliant. Adaptations of such genius can therefore be a bit dodgy…so it’s a challenge to get it right.  This adaptation by Anya Reiss, who wrote her first produced play at 17 and was part of the Royal Court Theatres Young Writers program, is a modern twist on the timeless family drama. Such a youthful mope fits perfectly with Chekhov’s melancholy soul and this ‘version’ of The Seagull loses none of the sarcasm and the vacuousness. In fact, it elevates it.

But this version has also the added bonus of an ambitious director and an incandescent cast. The Hollywood Fringe Festival might seem to have its own preconceptions about what could be performed, but this production’s rejection of norms is just as ‘punk’ as Chekhov and just as edgy as Reiss.  Casting is everything in this play. For the audience to care, to connect, to believe these disparate spoiled wretches and to love them in spite of themselves, we must believe the actors and so they must be sublime. And they are. Utterly.

It’s a tiny place to fit such a big drama, with seats down each side, as if the actors walk a catwalk, barely inches away from the audience and with minimal set and the addition of portable lights being manipulated and moved around, forcing the audience into almost uncomfortable gaze. It’s an ingenious way of making us pay attention to every sullen glance or preppy strut. The entire slightly awkward effect of actors and words and astonishingly apt music is absolutely riveting. Like a performance of a performance, which must have varied slightly each night. Bravo for the actors for incorporating these tacit movements and maneuvers into their already wonderful interpretations of their place in this story. It was late, it was warm, I was aware of everyone around me, actor and audience and stage manager, and yet that felt entirely perfect. Especially for this strange and ethereal writer whose life was like the melodramas he wrote so beautifully.

This play was so intelligently and emotionally cast and none of it seemed contrived. The combination of trans, gay and mixed-race casting felt so perfectly natural and every actor was so incredible in their roles that I felt it necessary to ask thedirector, Josh Sobel, where these choices originated and how they occurred. So I reached out and asked him and he was lovely enough to illuminate his process…

Josh Sobel:

The process was in part a typical “let’s get a bunch of people I trust and adore together and do a Fringe show”, and then in part inspired by a process I learned about through and adapted from the director Will Davis, recently appointed AD of Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre in New York and one of the only openly trans artistic directors in the country. For The Seagull, each actor was told that while final casting would of course be gender- and race-conscious, they should ignore the historical and expected demographics typically associated with each role. Instead, they were asked more holistically “Which role(s) resonate most with you / who is really speaking to you directly and why”. And we cast from there, based on the personal associations and identities of the people in the room. And their identities are thus essential to their approach to each character, which in our view only deepens and personalizes the performance that much more through giving each actor increased agency both within the casting process and in the embodiment of the characters themselves. There’s a lot of rhetoric in our industry about inclusive and next-generation casting approaches – the recent Tony’s being very much part of that conversation at the moment – but it’s still something I encounter a lot of fear and resistance toward when it comes to building actual, structural processes and approaches. This production is very much an actualization, an embodiment of not only how such a process can work in real terms to create new opportunities, but why we believe that agency-rooted approaches to casting and acting, in fact, yields enriched storytelling and powerful performance on any level. 

With the staging and design, I’m always curious about breaking proscenium expectations and finding ways to create intimacy through space, hence the alley approach. With the scenic and lighting design and lack of furniture, though, that is rooted in a core idea I associate with the play. And that is the idea of “falseness,” of artifice or fakeness. I see this notion as a foundation of the play. It exists not only in the play within the play and the story being built around people involved in the theatre, which as truthful or honest as we can make it will always be an act of pretending. But it likewise exists, in my view, in each character – Arkadina’s false clinging to the image of her past self, Konstantin’s need for his mother’s approval rather than simply making the work he wants to make, Nina’s soon-shattered fantasy of what being an actor is, the hopelessness of Masha’s pursuit of Konstantin, and of Medvedenko’s pursuit of Masha, Trigorin literally refers to himself as a fake… the list goes on. And so I wanted to bring this idea into the materiality of the play itself – hence paper bags and standing lights. I wanted a space that is literally built of paper and wires, of something fragile that could be pushed over and destroyed easily because it’s really built on nothing but these false needs, these longings and the blinder-wearing with which everyone seeks to fill those longings. 

The Seagull completes its run this Saturday night at Thymle. Tickets are sold out, but you may be able to score on if you are willing to give up your first born… it’s a very popular show. With good reason!

One can only hope for an extension!!!

The Cast

THE SEAGULL features an ensemble cast: Avalon Greenberg Call as Konstantin, Donté Ashon Green as Arkadina, Adzua Amoa as Nina, Miguel Nuñez as Trigorin, Anu Bhatt as Masha, Alejandra Jaime as Medvedenko, Cal Walker as Sorin, BK Dawson as Dorn, Juan Ayala as Polina, and Hope Simpson as Shamrayev. 

The Team

The production team for THE SEAGULL includes Ian Olsen (scenic design), Cad Apostol (lighting design), LEXI (costume consultant), Max Kunke (stage manager) and Yameng Deng (assistant director). 

Where:

Asylum @ Thymele Arts (California Room), 5481 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90029

Tickets:

https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/9636?tab=tickets

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