Last Night at Balls Cabaret

The overall structure of my blog requires me to not be in control of my own destiny when it comes to which shows I get to see during the Fringe, and so I'm glad that last night, or rather early this morning, I was able to attend the Fringe Preview at Balls Cabaret. I saw snippets of a few shows that I'm really looking forward to, and a couple that made me contemplate ways of rigging my dice to avoid them. Here's a brief breakdown of the evening... And some thoughts to go along...

Per my earlier prediction, Goats looks to be a winner. In fact, I would call that my fave of the evening. Story-teller Alan Berks does a great job of keeping every ear riveted on him, every eye, too. I'm not normally a fan of one-man shows, but this one could definitely change my mind.

Actually, a couple of the ones last night could make that leap for me. Joe Scrimshaw's solo piece Jack & Ben's 10th Annual Bar Crawl and Moveable Feast also elevated itself beyond the point of being just a one-man show. I was laughing very hard on the first of his two monologues, and then he launched into a second one which just about had me doubling over.

Apparently there is nothing more entertaining than having a father who is a hitman, because two of the shows featured at Balls had that as the main topic. One was a selection from Ferrari McSpeedy's Punk Rock Awesome. The other was one of the short plays from the Fast Fringe #1. Now, I don't know who wrote the selection from the Fast Fringe, so I don't know who I'll be offending with this next comment. Hopefully not the entire group of playwrights that put this thing together. I'm hoping that this selection is not representative of the 10 plays as a whole. That's all I'm going to say on that. As for the Ferrari McSpeedy thing...Great! Odd lads that they are, the two guys who did this sketch were clearly having fun and sharing that with us in the audience. Beautiful.

David Ives established a style of play with his plays Sure Thing and Variations on the Death of Trotsky (Both of which are in his book, All in the Timing). I call them "ding" plays. That is, there is a point at which the action ceases to move forward on its own, a bell dings and the action restarts from an earlier point in the script and "rewrites" itself in front of the audience. Movie buffs might recognize this as the "Groundhog Day" phenomenon. Unfortunately for the folks putting on Prodigal this gimmick was heavily used in the plays of the early 90s, and is a little tired. The writing of the show was otherwise good, though.

We saw a few others last night that didn't rub me one way or the other. And those that really rubbed me wrong, I'll do the favor of not mentioning here.

So...
I hope that helps a bit in your selection of shows for your schedule.