Chicago Fringe Festival 2010 review roundup, part one

The inaugural Chicago Fringe Festival kicked off yesterday afternoon and continues through Sunday. TOC's staff is endeavoring to review as many of the fest's 45 pieces as we can in that brief window; our first dozen takes are after the jump. Find venues and showtimes at the Chicago Fringe's website.

Annee Pocalypse
This satyrical retelling of Annie opens with a musical number featuring drag zombies in assless chaps munching on bloodied human entrails. It's 2012. Sarah Palin has been elected president. A disease turns the dead into zombies, and no one can afford the health-insurance–covered vaccine. Annee's a lovable prostitute searching for her long lost Daddy Starbucks while dodging nuclear bombs. It might be a hard knock life for the blind, balding redhead and her gang of drag hookers, but it's easy to watch Chicago's Hubris Productions make this plot work, and deft slap-stick acting (including a stellar performance by Holly Portman as Grace, Daddy Starbucks' secretary) makes the pseudo-political content frighteningly funny. Great penis gag lines—"Leapin' Limpdick!"—and strong vocals put to witty lyrics had us laughing hours past the play's 50 minutes.—Madeline Nusser

The Bad Arm—Confessions of a Dodgy Irish Dancer
As a “Plastic Paddy” in ’70s London, neither shore of the Irish Sea welcomed Máire Clerkin as one of its own, and an errant right elbow frequently jabbed its way between her and approval from her folk-dance teacher mother, despite genuine interest in carrying on the family tradition. Clerkin jigs among various UK accents and precise characterizations with ease, drawing plenty of laughs at the expense of her younger self, but we know the bumbling child she describes will become the warm, talented personality before us, so it all goes down easy.—Zachary Whittenburg

Believe in Nothing, Mock Everything
Dressed in mud-colored body stockings and armed with porcu-breasts, horns, a giant phallus, bad teeth and untold bulbous masses, the Chicago-based troupe Les Enfants Terribles indulges in a series of strategic shouts and murmurs, with the occasional Beatles or Marvin Gaye song or repurposed PSA thrown in for good measure. This Sendak-goes-Dada spectacle adds up to an eccentric portrait of family, albeit a family for which Drano-drinking is the norm. For all its grotesquerie, the show is finally more endearing than bizarre, performed with straight-faced conviction and a good sense of proportion.—Ben Kenigsberg

BRIDGES: A Collection in Progress
Technical difficulties beset most of the half-dozen shorts on this bill of dance-theater and poetry, but even so, take “in progress” as the key descriptor here. Little is complete in concept or execution, and most scenes lie on the far edge of accessibility for those of us offstage. Abra Johnson’s confident delivery of rich language (“She is a wicked, lovely commotion”) and Meccasia Zabriskie’s In My Mother’s House—an homage to strength gleaned from family and movement—are, for now, the only ports in a storm, though the material does hold promise.—Zachary Whittenburg

Christmas in Bakersfield
During most of Kurkendaal’s funny autobiographical monologue, post-racial America seems like a pipe dream. Forced to visit his boyfriend Mike’s family in “the armpit of California,” the L.A. actor-playwright is horrified to learn—as the couple drives to Bakersfield—that Mike’s lily-white, conservative relatives don’t know he’s black. Christmas in Bakersfield feels like an extended anecdote, as Kurkendaal recalls fielding head-spinning comments and questions, alternating with his hosts’ endearing attempts to bond over Oprah and Condoleezza Rice. We wish Kurkendaal’s characterizations of Mike’s relatives were more nuanced—mom Linda’s represented by a falsetto, “liberal media”–hating brother Jeff just bellows—but his humor sells this story of two-way tolerance, and the untidy ending’s pretty clever.—Lauren Weinberg

Finding Eleusis
Greek mythology's most captivating tales—a son makes love to his mom then gouges his eyes out, two lovers from warring families off themselves in the name of love—can still be snooze fests. This certainly isn’t the case for this contemporary drama about goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone.  Any daydreaming is kept at bay by the cast's well-used bits of profanity, sexual innuendos and a funny Jerry Springer–style talk show scene. As the myth goes, Zeus (the supreme god of Olympus) has Hades (the god of the underworld) abduct his daughter. In turn, Demeter (the goddess of agriculture) makes the earth cold and infertile, until Persephone returns each spring. The actors' casual portrayals and musical accompaniment (even with pitchy vocals) allows the audience members to ponder their own opinions about eternal life, death, fear and change.—D.L. Hopkins

Get Rich Cheating
New York–based comedian Jeff Kreisler’s fake seminar on turning your life around through deceit hits targets that’ll be familiar to any Daily Show aficionado: Worldcom, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Madoff.  Like Stephen Colbert, Kreisler adopts a cluelessly obnoxious persona through which he skewers the ruthlessness and corruption turning American democracy into a synonym for exploitation. It’s essentially a one-joke premise, but the comic offers plenty of polished one-liners and wry observations along the way.  “Don’t say you’re laying people off,” he admonishes. “Just tell them you’ve lowered the retirement age to now.”—John Beer

Grind: The Musical
It's hard not to greet the melodramatic plot of this musical from a group of Carleton College students with an eye roll. A neighborhood coffee house being shut down by demolition! So forget about the plot. Because the youthful enthusiasm and humor that comprises the rest of the production has charm to spare. Each member of the cast of eclectic coffee-shop "regulars" is constructed with zeitgesty eccentricities, from the girl who always shows up with her laptop and sings, "I'm not a creeper; I'm just writing a web comic starring you," to the Minnesotan who does a spoken-word poem to Culver's Frozen Custard.—Julia Kramer

The Playdaters
Two guys, hundreds of girls and one complicated scoring system—that about sums up this comedic crowd-pleaser regarding two life-long friends, Spencer (Neil Haven) and Erwin (Jeremiah Munsey), who don’t take life too seriously—or dating for that matter. For kicks and laughs, they start an internet dating site to get girls, and dare each other to do outrageous things on the dates to get points in their dating game, such as get drunk and try not to let your date notice. But the game changes when Spencer goes on a real date and falls in love. The latter half of the play turns into a commentary about the philosophy of dating and relationships, which kind of flattens things towards the end—but the crazy shenanigans of Spencer and Erwin and the actors' infectious energy put a lingering smile on our faces.—Lori Moody

The Roast of Piglet
Tigger’s a meth addict, Pooh an ornery drunk, and everybody fucks Kanga: This scabrous Friars-style roast uncovers the seamy side of A. A. Milne’s beloved creations. Alan Brouilette and his local band of miscreants may overstate just how transgressive their show really is; one could imagine Bob Saget, for instance, taking the premise into dark, twisted places that this Roast of Piglet only hints at. Still, the Annoyance-style proceedings are undeniably crude and often quite funny. R. John Barenboim’s Eeyore unleashes his quips with Steven Wright’s stoner drawl, while as Piglet, Shannon Ennis attacks her Hundred Acre Wood confreres and flips off the audience with demented brio.—John Beer

Silken Veils
Darya, an Iranian-born American, reconciles herself with the dissolution of her parents' marriage as set against the 1979 Iranian revolution in this dreamlike piece from California-based Pantea Productions that incorporates animated projections, music, puppetry and a heavy dash of poetry by the revered 13th-century Persian writer Rumi. Writer-performer Leila Ghaznavi artfully conveys Darya's angst in the flashback sequences, in which her parents are dually portrayed, in silhouette by human performers behind a screen and onstage by handsomely designed and operated marionettes. The present-day framing device, however, in which Darya's head trip is prompted by a wedding-day panic attack over her decision to marry a fellow Persian, is clunky and cliched.—Kris Vire

The Texas Chainsaw Musical
It’s hard to believe that I’d be asking for another song from Leatherface and his hapless victims, especially when this show’s strength seems at first glance to be that it’s a lean, mean 35 minutes. Everyone is very gung-ho, and the entire cannibal family takes up instruments to jam for the climactic number (so loud that most of the lyrics about ‘dinner time’ were lost), but the show’s secret weapon is Amanda Hartley, who has an actual, honest-to-god singing voice. When it all wrapped up so fast, I honestly thought we’d been shortchanged. No, I don’t want a five-hour rock opera based on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but one more song amidst all the chainsawing and Texas-mocking would have been nice.—Hank Sartin

Click here for part two of our Fringe coverage.