Fringe 2025 - Returning Favorites - Andrew Erskine Wheeler (Wheeler In The Sky) - In the Garden of American Heroes

Andrew Erskine Wheeler, one of the best actors we have in the Twin Cities, is back again with another of his historically-based solo shows, after two previous back to back award-winning historically-based, 5-star solo show performances in Booth’s Ghost, and Whoosh! The Civil War Mythology of Michael Hickey and His Perilous Precipitation Over St. Anthony Falls.

Do I really need to remind anyone who’s seen either or both of his previous shows that any new creation from Wheeler is definitely something you want on your schedule?  Funny, insightful, smart, taking history’s various misfits and making them fully human, while also never letting them off the hook for their faults and misdeeds.  This time, it’s General George Armstrong Custer.

He also had a charming Fringe preview for the new show (below) during which he reminded us there is a nudity warning (“I cannot stress enough the reading of the show descriptions”)

In the Garden of American Heroes
Wheeler in the Sky
Venue: Southern Theatre
 
Show Description:
An astounding solo show about American memory, myths, and monuments as told by an atrociously monumental a**hole.
 
From a restless haunt along the Greasy Grass, Custer's atrocious, asinine specter lampoons and laments the vainglories of life, and his own infamous legacy of the Last Stand at Little Big Horn. In The Garden Of American Heroes is a satirical, scathing, and scandalous indictment of what has currently befallen the National Endowment of the Arts and what it means to be both memorialized, and metastasized, into American cultural mythology.
 
To honor the 250th anniversary of the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts has provided a list of 250 suitable American Heroes to be the subject matter of future grants. The list of heroes is taken from the proposed list of 250 sculptures for the National Garden of American Heroes to be located in the Black Hills of South Dakota near Mount Rushmore. Conspicuously absent from that list is one of the most famous (and admittedly infamous) names associated with the Black Hills, and all of American history, General George Armstrong Custer. 

Ozymandias as told by Aladdin’s Genie, Wheeler In The Sky revels in Kings and Fools: Titanic emotions, laughter thru tears, archetypes and archvillains, cathartic, confessional, irredeemable characters seeking redemptive arcs; sometimes colossally wrenching, sometimes colossal wrecks. 

Genre & Content:
Comedy, Drama, Solo Show, Historical Content, Political Content, Shakespearian Elements
Warnings:
Adult Language, Crude Humor, Nudity, Violence, Other Divisive Content

(Always intrigued when a show tags itself for “Other Divisive Content” - what *are* we in for that isn’t covered by the other warnings? :)

 

 

Here’s some handy links to my Fringe Top 10, Top 11 to 20 and Returning Favorites lists for this year, as well as all the coverage of this year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival.