Fringe - Day 8 - Part 2

Marlene Dietrich and Edith Piaf: The Kamikaze and the Chameleon
Hey City downstairs

I'm very glad I got I chance to see this after all.

The music, as you might expect, was lovely and fun in equal measure.

The two actresses obviously admire the women they are portraying and deliver their performances with great heart and gusto.

Hopefully, this isn't the last we've seen of this production. It was done in slightly longer form in the Illusion Theater's Fresh Ink series last month, and there is such a wealth of material about these women, both their songs and how they lived, that we could easily have spent twice the time with them and still only begun to scratch the surface.

It was fun to see these two very different lives intersect and affect one another so deeply. There's both a lot of humor and heart.

And the ladies earned every flower that was thrown their way for singing, particularly Josette Antomarchi as Piaf.

Heck, even the program had a sense of fun and whimsy about it.

I feel a little bad for the guy who wrote the one poor review for this show. He obviously wasn't enjoying himself, but in leaving so soon after the show began, he missed the peaks of emotion and humor that were the show's high points. There's some very moving and amusing stuff going on in the latter half of this production.

Is it perfect? No. But it's still growing. And even in its newborn state, it brought audience members to their feet, not to leave, but to applaud and cheer the performances. That has to count for something.

As I say, hopefully we haven't seen the last of what is quite clearly a labor of love, and we'll get to share a little strudel with Kirsten Frantzich and Josette Antomarchi again soon.