What a wonderful first week at the Fringe it has been. We have ticket stubs and show flyers coming out our ears, we’re sleep-deprived, and the pedometer on my iPhone is very proud of me. I’ve seen 31 shows already (just 3,162 left to go and I’ll have seen them all).
Looking at the top-rated shows on our theater list at the moment, there’s a theme that runs through many of them: gay gay gay. Some are serious dramatic works, some are hilarious comedies, and some manage to be both at the same time.
Black Faggot is the best show I’ve seen so far. It’s a two-man play about the coming out of a gay Samoan in New Zealand (at least I think it was set in New Zealand, given the kiwi accents of some of the characters). The interweaving scenes are so skillfully crafted, and the acting (not to mention the actors) is just gorgeous. It’s mainly a drama, but there are some very funny comedic vignettes woven in.
Also on the serious side of the spectrum, Outings is a dramatic reading by five performers of various coming out stories, peppered with bits of gay history. I was exchanging show recommendations with a visiting gay New Yorker who rolled his eyes and said he had endured his fill of coming out theater, but as we have not yet reached that point, we were happy to see this moving, well-performed piece. All of the actors also have other shows at the Fringe; four of them (Rob Deering, Andrew Doyle, Camille Ucan, and Zoe Lyons) are always the same and the fifth is a rotating guest performer.
Of course the Fringe also has plenty of campy cross-dressing shows, too. We (along with the rest of the audience) had a fabulous time at Margaret Thatcher Queen of Soho, an alternate history in which Margaret Thatcher gets lost in London’s gay neighborhood and becomes a drag queen. There’s a fair bit of actual British history woven into this one, so we got to feel like we were learning and watching an over-the-top drag show all at the same time (how often can you say that?).
Another favorite of mine so far was The Importance of Being Earnest as Performed by Three F*cking Queens and a Duck. There are actually three different productions of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Fringe this year, but only one promises queens and a duck (I’m a little disappointed in myself for not figuring out in advance what role the duck was going to play). If you’re a fan of the original play, you’ll love this one, in which our protagonists are given an ever-shorter time slot to stage their three-man production.
Looking for more Fringe recommendations? Check out our comedy, theater, and musical mini-reviews. More added daily!