Thursday, July 23, 2009

Fringe 2009 - FFA 2 - Alliteral Selection

"From the looks of you, all slick and shiny, you like you've had a fine time somewhere."

Jane McGough

Alliteral Selection: The True Tale of a Wayward Wallaby

The true tale of an accidental caper that involved a county fair, a marsupial, a covered bridge, a clever country lady and benevolent citizens who found themselves caught up in well-meaning yet comical events. Zumbrota, Minnesota showed pride and determination - with a wacky twist!

Well-meaning certainly applies here. I'm not sure about comical or wacky.

They've got their arts and crafts skills down, though. Three enormous tri-fold displays of vintage newspaper coverage of the wallaby incident were brought onstage by the three readers and unfolded to provide a little context to the action.

Well, not really action so much as a lot of reading.

A *lot* of reading.

It was less than three minutes (they got out on the yellow light), but it still felt like a *lot* of reading.

Of some, at times, not-so-great poetry. I don't mean to be mean, but some of this was really just, not good.

To be fair, the bulk of it was being read from pages of text tucked inside large book props. They're still in rehearsal mode (as many a Fringe show is), and pulling something out of context.

And the opening salvo, with the alliterative use of the letter W starting off nearly every other word, was very pleasant and engaging.

There also seemed to be some wallaby role-playing going on - Mrs. Wallaby none too pleased about Mr. Wallaby's return after a suspiciously long absence.

The combination of elements, and the subject matter, might make for an interesting, family-friendly outing at Fringe time.

But if I'm honest, it didn't grab me.

The Fringe's YouTube page has the clip up, so I'll apend it to the end of this post. Decide for yourself...

Also, some other online resources...

Another related post

And another

Her show page

Fringe-For-All preview...

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