Hollywood Fringe 2018: The NoPro Diary (Updated 6/18/2018)
Our up to the minute thoughts on what’s worth seeing at HFF2018
There’s more immersive at the Hollywood Fringe festival than ever, and figuring out what shows to take a gamble on gets trickier each year.
Our Fringe Diary helps cut through the noise, with capsule reviews and links to fuller reviews as they become available.
For our guide to everything immersive at Fringe, click here. See all of our Hollywood Fringe Festival 2018 coverage here.
This diary will update and expand regularly.
Essential — the can’t miss shows, almost certain to be revived.
Fringe Fun — bright spots in the Fringe lineup, that will hopefully get a life post-Fringe.
Workshop Worthy — productions that show promise, but need some tooling; these are good for the curious/completists. This is the heart of Fringe.
Pass On It — what it says on the tin.
Miscategorized — good, bad, indifferent: the point is the piece is labeled “immersive” in the official Fringe Guide, but is, in fact, not.
ESSENTIALS
Escape From Godot
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
They claimed that they were going to do the impossible: mix that play with an escape room. A claim so absurd and preposterous that it surely must have been hubris, no?
No.
They did it. They fucking did it. Appeal to the inhuman void at the center of all things for a simulacrum of justice in the form of a remount. This thing is perfect.
The Guest and The Host: Make Music
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
I beta tested this, and it was lovely. Since then people have approached and told me how much they loved the experience. An act of artisitc collaboration and self-expression, for non-musicans in particular this is a treat.
Snow Fridge
Review by Briana Roecks
It’s one of those shows that you cannot really describe in a way that fully captures what it is.
The Stars
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Ceaseless Fun returns to strong form with this pop-philosophical meditation on fame and identity to wrap up their first full season of happenings. Set against the backdrop of Hollywood Blvd., The Stars is a relay race from the banal to the sublime. Occasionally wrapped up tightly in its own musings, the piece is self-aware enough to deconstruct itself with manic energy, all in the hands of a cast who are adept at keeping it from becoming too ponderous. Poetic and at points absurd, and made all the more so thanks to the endless stream of tourists and revelers on one of Los Angeles’ most impossibly sad/beautiful streets.
One Last Thing Before You Go
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Sure, One Last Thing Before You Go is a little rough around the edges — the load-in could use some polishing and the dismount could use some oomph — but what lies at the heart of it is a flawless execution of a singularly great idea. One so good, that I don’t want to spoil anything. Pray for an extension/remount, because it is already sold out.
What Went Wrong?
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Mixing 360 Filmmaking and live immersive into a cohesive story, What Went Wrong? puts you into the role of a relationship analyst on your first day on the job. Now this isn’t a piece where VR and live action are meshed into one experience, but rather where the two mediums are used to create one narrative. It’s a tight little piece with solid live performances across the board. Delightful and surprising, this is one to make time for. Go in knowing as little as possible.
FRINGE FUN
Easy Targets: Artists and Heroes
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
I laughed so hard at one point, I worried that I was going to have a stroke. A collection of four deliberately terrible solo shows that are brilliantly executed to be so: all to encourage the audience to pelt the performers with rolled up socks. (Just 25 cents a sock! Refills available after each solo performance.) It’s a thing of comic beauty. Interactive theatre at its most raucous.
God: The Apologies Tour
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
What would you ask if you had the chance to meet God? That’s the opportunity writer-director-performer Erik Blair and his cohort of “Creators” give the audience of God: the Apologies Tour. Egalitarian religious philosophy and pop humor mingle in the form of a collection of experiences with various aspects of the Supreme Being. It’s a concept that probably shouldn’t work, yet does. Lovely moments of introspection mingle with the absurd, pointing the way towards something that could be rather compelling if expounded upon.
Workshop Worthy
When Skies Are Gray
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Creator/performer Ashley Steed recreates a painfully fresh emotional wound in this site-evocative exploration of saying goodbye to her mother in hospice. For those who have undergone similar trauma, the experience may proove cathartic. However a structure that throws the audience into the middle of things without any context of the relationship between the mother and daughter pair can keep the audience at a fully voyeuristic distance despite some participatory moments wherein select audience members take on the roles of nurses. A sequence late in the show might be better served at the top, and further development of this piece might benefit from exploring memory play tropes in order to forge a bridge to the audience. There’s something here, but it feels better suited to those initiated into the subject’s sad mysteries.
The Witnessing
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
An interesting conceit and solid performances are the plusses in this second show from The Unmarked Door. Guests are invited to a lecture on a purportedly real paranormal case. It’s all framed through the lens of a skeptic, a framing which doesn’t necessarily mesh with the desired effect of spooky us out. There’s something here, but tone and content aren’t quite pairing up the way they could.
Death and Coffee
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
An intensely personal story from writer Annie Lesser, what starts out as a conversation over coffee takes a hard right turn into a solo memory play. The conversational parts work well, and the story itself is moving on its own, but the transitions between modes needs structural work for this to take off and become something more than the sum of its parts.
Ghosts: A Whole New Immersive Theatre
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
This is Ibsen’s Ghosts, with a site-evocative design and staging that is visually compelling. Unfortunately the acting is often turned up to thirteen on a script whose emotional tones barely go up to seven. Director Jonghee Woo and his design team certainly have a strong visual sense, and the Ibsen has aged better than you might remember from college, but the acting needs to be reigned in. Pushing Ibsen out of naturalism takes a steady hand, not a guitar amp. Also I’m not really sure what the folks who got to drink wine and eat dessert in the middle of the stage got out of their experience, as their POV was locked while they were snacking.
PASS ON IT
Unreal City
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Staggeringly ambitious. Fundamentally broken. Unreal City is a frustrating exercise that asks the question, “What would happen if you tried to turn the streets around Santa Monica and Vine into The McKittrick Hotel?” Some flashes of excellent scene work are wasted amidst badly-paced traversal elements, exasperated by uneven acting. Sometimes it feels like the production is the work of people who think they’ve got just one shot to try everything they’ve ever dreamed of. Maybe a quarter of it works. Those who have never seen immersive theatre may be awed by the sheer scale, but they can just as easily be turned off by how little sense the story makes. Occasionally cringe-worthy, as the in-public staging is seemingly unaware of its surroundings, which sometimes literally drown out the dialogue. Or you might find yourself having to tell passerby that it’s just a show so they don’t freak out. Which is a bummer. There’s some good work in the piece, but it’s far too long, disjointed, and logistically hobbled to recommend. It also takes 20 minutes for anything other than exposition to happen: none of which pays off. That’s just deadly right there. Back to the drawing board.
One Brief Moment of Joy
Notes by Noah J. Nelson
Is one brief moment of joy worth $50? I don’t usually like to judge work by its ticket price, yet the question hangs there in the air. The answer is firmly “No.” A collection of joyful tasks and activities is seemingly mined from the audience as part of an interview process that preceeds the show, and yet the most joy-bringing experience in the hour spent in the admittedly lovely bungalow home in the heart of Hollywood was one seemingly meant for someone else. (I made chocolate buttercream frosting. My love of cooking was never touched on in the half hour that was spent talking around the concept of joy the day before.) OBMOJ suffers from being clearly driven by its artistic conceits without coming in for a landing. It’s not so much that moments work, but that scenarios could work if they were developed. The whole thing is wrapped in a narrative frame that is seemingly never referenced in the work itself. Upon leaving the — again, very lovely — home and reviewing notes with a friend he was shocked to realize he’d spent $50 on the time.
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