Round-Up: MORE FRINGE FESTIVAL FUN & FRUSTRATION

Back to the Fringe Festival -- that theatrical crap-shoot.  A few weeks wherein 197 plays produced is bound to produce some gems for theatrical prospectors and bound to yield the "ehhh!!!" among the edgy.  Here, in my second round-up, I look at two musicals.  I report on how I rather enjoyably sat through satire and am in the camp of admirers for a musical taking place at summer camp.  Next time, I'll get to some that are more problematic:  the brought-back-from-the-dead 1970s flop Broadway musical Platinum needs more shining up, and am sad to say you won't be bound to be spellbound for more than a short spell by Spellbound, and wouldn't be rushin' to see a certain Russian gal's story.

See www.fringenyc.org for info on all shows: dates, places, and ticket information.  It's all taking place in downtown Manhattan.

Nothing is sacred and immune from being fodder for fun-filled attacks -- even the play itself, as text projected on a screen hilariously comments on what we are watching --- in a wild satire at LaMaMa on East 4th Street.  The audacious mix of broad boisterousness and sharp skewering is called The Pig, the Farmer and the Artist, with book, music and lyrics all by creative tornado David Chesky, designed and directed by A. Scott Parry, with a nine-piece formally dressed orchestra conducted by Anthony Aibel.  When you walk into a Fringe show and see  a nine-piece orchestra on stage, including a harp, you know it's unusual and someone cares about the music.  The other musicals carting around an electronic keyboard, and one I saw the same day/same venue which used pre-recorded tracks often drowning out the singers, can hang its head in comparative shame.  This show bills itself as "an operatic satire about sex, music, and art."  And that it is!  Much of the effect comes from having singers perform in grandiose operatic style and attitude while singing about livestock and having the livestock sing.  And some of the words sung are the four-letter kind one doesn't expect to hear in an opera.  We're quickly prepared for anything -- and get almost anything --- when the pig enters brandishing his freakishly long male genitalia represented by a plastic tube wrapped a few times around itself like a garden hose.  This titular character shares stage time with a teatular character of a cow with a red boa partially covering her prominently displayed set of nippled costume creation, and her husband, a cross-dressing bull in a tutu.  Other animals abound, played by a trio of multi-tasking ensemble members who switch species by switching beaks and snouts and movement style and sounds.  Cock-a-doodle doings are mad and merry and the three work hard to great effect, also getting to play a myriad of human beings.  The farmer, a bass baritone in overalls and overall played in a no-nonsense way amidst the nonsense by Cory Clines.  The other title character is dismissed by him when he says he doesn't have any use for a painter because he just had his barn painted last year.  But since we're in for a satire of the art world, specifically the New York one, we know the character will be prominent and have artistic integrity or talent, may not be the thing that spells success or respect from some corners.  Tenor Christopher Preston Thompson, as an actor-singer-dancer, entertainingly paints a portrait of the artist as terrorized at first by being bought and sold, indentured, rejected, and finally getting his say, sort of.   Though not for the easily offended or those allergic to madness, the show has a lot going for it.  Its humor has variety.  It's one moment a juvenile giggle-worthy, sex-centered guilty pleasure, next moment  slinging poison-dipped, but deserved, arrows at pretentiousness and trend-worshiping in the arts, and often tossing out surprise quips and jokes like confetti.  I laughed a lot.  I rolled my eyes, too, as things rolled along.  The novelty wears thin by the second act, as we get used to the absurd and cheeky Chesky gets a little more heavy-handed with his hammering away at pretentiousness.  But in a full-length, two-act piece, how many repetitive scenes of the same arguing or strutting farm animals  do we need before it feels like another cock-and-bull story where George Orwell's Animal Farm -- or Old MacDonald's -- exploded?  But it's a mostly fun explosion.  The on-screen text with attitude, urging that we must get on with it and hurry up "the so-called plot" does need to take its advice somewhat.  There's accomplished work here and it stirs things up and is entertaining and unpredictable in many moments.   A naughty child worth listening to and agreeing with is in town.

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Bunked looks at five summer camp counselors, though we never see their campers or other co-workers and don't hear that much about them.  It's a cast of just those five, although we also hear the recorded voice of Michael Urie with some heavy attitude from the guy on the loudspeaker making announcements.  Not that we need any more attitude.  These five, who have recently finished high school, have plenty of 'tude, dude.  Two are twins, a perky but insecure girl and her Gay brother who brings mucho camp of the other sense of the word.  They quickly become attracted to the same fellow counselor and the fellow in question is not quick to announce his own sexual preference, if he has one.  Labels are for clothes, not people, we're told---in song.  The other two we meet are a straight guy who's the veteran,  having been a camper prior to his counseling days, and a girl who seems to have a chip on her shoulder,  but we soon learn it's more of a weight and it's justified.  No spoiler here. An ensemble piece, it's played with spunk and heart, often appealing and with its aforementioned heart in the right place, even if the place is obvious and one character's heart has a problem.  The songs are entertaining and well sung with brio and some sweetness, but they do tend to repeat their ideas and points rather than develop and build to a new place by their end.  Music is by Bradford Proctor with lyrics by him and Alaina Kunin.  Seth Sikes directs.  On the plus side, the characters sing like kids with some good use of slang and current lingo-- such as a number about how, confronted by new feelings of their own and those pursuing them romantically, they "are "thinking, like, 'whoa.'"  However, some rhyming seems unnecessarily  showy, with the kids using some unnatural language choices (do 18-year-olds describe each other as "disarming"-- or is it just that we need a rhyme for the more comfortable "charming.")  The Gay guy doesn't get much of an arc, stuck in the role of comic relief and prancing attitude with some cliche.  However, all in all, we root for them and care about them and that's what's most important.  It's a coming-of-age story worth coming to see.