Out On The Fringe

Every year in August, an unfortunate group of original plays and musicals are produced in various theatrical venues in lower Manhattan, which are collectively called the New York International Fringe Festival.  This has been going on for the last 18 years or so, and seems to be the annual magnet that brings together the most self-indulgent, undercooked, weird, irony-dependent, reference-driven, hack pieces of theatre that the Western world has ever known.  If you've ever spent any time in New York, you have undoubtedly met or bumped into someone whose brother was "bringing another one of his wacky scripts to life this year at the Fringe". Everyone has a friend who begs you to come see them this year in their Fringe performance of a suicidal rockhopper in "Flightless South: One Penguin's Odyssey through Music".  OK, I made that one up, but here's an actual list of recent and upcoming Fringe festival offerings, which you can actually look up if you don't believe me:

Theatre for the Arcade:  Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage

Jersey Shoresical:  A Frickin' Rock Opera

Infectious Opportunity, the story of a man who fakes having AIDS for fame and fortune

Silence! the Musical

Flaccid Penis Seeks Vaginal Dryness

Alienne:  The Musical Adventures of My Little Martian

The Boston Tea Party Opera

Depression: The Musical

F**k You! You F**king Perv!, a solo performance featuring tap dancing

Gary Busey's One Man Hamlet, (Gary Busey was not involved with this production)

The Internet!: A Complete History (Abridged)

Pickles & Hargraves and the Curse of the Tanzanian Glimmerfish, about a mouse detective

Seven Seductions of Taylor Swift

It is from this muculent swamp of storytelling that once crawled the Fringe festival's one and only hit:  Urinetown: The Musical.  Clearly, it's title belongs in the above list.  In 1999, Urinetown was such an overwhelming success that it ultimately made the incredibly rare transfer to Broadway in 2001.  The Fringe has been trying to recreate that lightning strike every year since, and has never come close.  But hopes were high back in the summer of 2011.

In August of 2011, Urinetown's original creators, Greg Kotis and Mark Hollmann, returned to the Fringe with a fresh new show: Yeast Nation.  See the parallel?  (First word of title: a disgusting biological substance [Urine/Yeast]; second word of title: social organizational structure [Town/Nation]).  Uh-oh.

In spite of the similarity in titles, Yeast Nation isn't really a sequel; it's more of a prequel, actually.  It tells the tale of a the prehistoric collection of yeast and other organisms that first formed themselves from the primordial soup on the ocean floor.  All of the characters play yeast, and dress in white robes.  Sweet mercy.

If you haven't heard of Yeast Nation, there's a reason.  It will not be touring.  For all the cleverness of Kotis and Hollmann in creating the Urinetown script and score, they are almost certainly destined to go down in history as one-hit wonders, unable to capitalize on, or grow past, their initial success.  Still, the Fringe festival keeps trying, each year with renewed attempts to find that rare hit show, the elusive Bigfoot of Broadway.  And you never know. Expectations are high for the upcoming, Adventures of Swamp Girl.  Hope springs eternal.

POST-SCRIPT:

Although the Fringe festival has come under a fair amount of derision from me in this post, they did, in my opinion, demonstrate a particularly brave moment a few years ago that you might appreciate, too.  You may recall from my previous post, A Legal Matter, that back in 2006 the director and choreographer of the 2001 Broadway production of Urinetown sued two small regional theatre companies for plagiarising their material.  Right after they filed suit, the original director and choreographer of the 1999 Fringe Festival production of Urinetown, Joe McDonnell, sued the Broadway team, for plagiarising his material.  He didn't really expect to win anything; he just wanted to make a statement, and point out what nearly everyone was already thinking - those Broadway guys are behaving like jerks.  Having a Fringe festival alumni sue a Broadway production team for plagiarism while the Broadway team was doing the same is exactly the kind of sweet irony that Urinetown is known for in the first place.  Did Joe McDonnell have a case?  You decide: