Friendly neighborhood actress lady and blogger extraordinaire Leigha Horton has been blogging the Fringe, since she’s not in a show this year. My favorite part: Audio interviews with folks in line. Of course she knows, like, everyone in line. Follow along. As a theater type person, she asks performers and directors totally different questions than I would ever ask.

Slideshows of official Fringe photos are going up at fringefestival.org.

I was just wondering, and my question was answered: Opening weekend numbers were great! From Thursday through Sunday, 14,215 tickets were sold. Up 10% over last year’s opening weekend attendance which you’ll note was somewhat dampened by that bridge that fell down.

On to the reviews.

The Survival Pages by Malia Burkhart
Malia ponders humanity’s relationship with nature, talks about hosting her own wildlife show, asks the questions we all ask about how we’re killing our planet and what we should be doing to conserve and survive, and goes on this kind of interesting exploration of soil vs dirt. All this is presented with spoken word, some kind of free-form movement that I wouldn’t quite call dance, some recliner acrobatics, video, this really cool thing where she makes her own cocoon, and a bucket of dirt. I didn’t find the story she told to be gripping, exactly, but I really liked the way she presented it. I’m sure every Fringe artist puts a lot of thought into their show, but it was interesting watching the show keeping in mind that every little bit was very carefully considered (having skimmed through her blog dedicated to the development of this show which includes the cut-and-pasting of a rejection of her request for a second projector by the Fringe’s tech director which she is not pleased with). One last showing Friday at 7pm. If you’re looking to try something “different” this is a good option.

JACK by Eric Van Wyk
So this is a reinterpretation of the Jack and the Beanstalk story. The puppets were really cool. He had several different types so it wasn’t just different characters, it was puppets with truly different aesthetics which made for good variety. Some of the puppetry techniques and production elements were pretty cool, like how he portrayed the passage of time with the moon rise and how he portrayed traveling with the scrolling backdrop and how he portrayed the growing of the bean stalk. In some cases, the execution wasn’t entirely polished. The actual story itself was totally meh. I think an 8-year-old would enjoy it quite a bit. As much as I enjoyed it visually, I found myself ready for it to be over, or at least pick up the pace, about halfway through and I really didn’t get the ending. If you have kids, take ’em. Last night was his first show, so he’s got four more. Coincidentally, this guy went to school in Iowa back in the day with one of my co-workers. I told my co-worker to go see it anyway.

Further miscellaneous observations…