Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
SD Fringe: Dr. Frankenstein’s Traveling Freakshow and The Peacock and the Nightingale
Freako-centric Vaudeville done right, Marilyn and Edith done wrong
Dr. Frankenstein's Travelling Freak Show
Sd Fringe: Dr. Frankenstein's Travelling Freak Show
- Spreckels Theatre, 121 Broadway, Downtown San Diego
- $5 - $10
Dr. Frankenstein’s Traveling Freakshow, Tin Shed Theatre Company
The Fringe’s “Off Broadway” space is the stage of the Spreckels Theatre. Tiers of folding chairs, their backs to the house seats, provide an intimate atmosphere.
Tin Shed, from the United Kingdom, presents an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel acted by “freaks.” The Master of Ceremonies, Julius M. Barker (Justin Cliffe) may be the biggest freak of all: a functionally insane sadist, he directs his cast like the Marquis de Sade at Charenton asylum, but with more vigor and brutality.
His “cast” includes Bethilda the Bearded Lady (Georgina Harris), who needs flickering electroshock treatment to get into character, Sangieve (Antonio Rimola), part-lobster, part-mind reader (who can read the mind of a lobster — or can he?), and The Monster (Aled Wyn-Thomas), who looks a lot like Dr. Frankenstein’s original, Until he speaks his speeches trippingly and swears he’s been miscast.
The piece, which has some lulls in pacing, is a kind of freako-centric tribute to Vaudeville. Enhanced by silhouettes on a rear curtain, the performers expertly bang into each other, mug clichéd expressions, and create oversized slapstick. And the show, ever about to fall apart (whence cometh much of the humor), goes on, prodded by the M.C.’s relentless cruelty (imagine Rocky Horror’s Dr. Frank N. Furter on meth).
What Tin Shed does may not appeal to all tastes. But they do what they do quite well.
SD Fringe: Peacock and the Nightingale
- Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 Tenth Avenue, East Village
- $5 - $10
The Peacock and the Nightengale, by David Bottomly
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) blamed her “prickly” childhood, in part, on her parents. “They were too young when they married,” she told an interviewer in 1959, “and didn’t know anything about life.”
For that reason, she refused to attend her mother’s funeral.
She was six feet tall. Her look — head wrapped in a turban, long, dark velvet, Elizabethan-styled dresses, flaunted jewelry — became as recognizable as her experimental poetry. In all things, she was an outsider. Fiercely so.
In 1954, while touring Hollywood for a magazine article, her editors arranged a meeting with Sitwell’s exact opposite, he thought: Marilyn Monroe, Tinseltown’s reigning pin-up Venus. The editors assumed they’d hate each other on sight. Surely a catfight of Nietzchean proportions would ensue.
The Peacock and the Nightingale
Not so. Sitwell detected a “strangely tragic” glint in her face “like a beautiful ghost.. and the vegetation spirit of Ophelia.”
Monroe was delighted to drop her image as a boulder-dumb ingénue and talk books and ideas. For half an hour, they chatted about the Austrian “anthro-philosopher” Rudolf Steiner.
The meeting’s a neat idea for a one-act play. Bring them on, break down barriers, set them free.
Bottomly’s script promises to show the real Sitwell “behind the shades” and Marilyn, too. But it’s a full, cover-to-cover rewrite away.
The director George Cukor is filming the meeting. For unknown reasons, Sitwell and Monroe are scripted. The piece takes too much time with this device: word choices, missing a line, rewriting. At one point, as if commenting on the text, Cukor says “let’s get this back on track.” He’s right, since the play rambles without a through-line.
It’s also predictable, and spouts time-worn clichés about Hollywood (“the studios are god”; “why can’t love be more like it is in the movies?”).
The performances are uneven. Loie Gail really looks like Sitwell, though she could trill her R’s less and be less external. Rhianna Basore really looks like Monroe, though her accent wavers toward French. Credit the accuracy to Mallory Devlin’s “costume alterations”: Sitwell a pillar of black velvet; Monroe all in white with high-grade platinum hair.
Here's something you might be interested in.
SD Fringe: Dr. Frankenstein’s Traveling Freakshow and The Peacock and the Nightingale
Freako-centric Vaudeville done right, Marilyn and Edith done wrong
SD Fringe: Dr. Frankenstein’s Traveling Freakshow and The Peacock and the Nightingale
Freako-centric Vaudeville done right, Marilyn and Edith done wrong
Dr. Frankenstein's Travelling Freak Show
Sd Fringe: Dr. Frankenstein's Travelling Freak Show
- Spreckels Theatre, 121 Broadway, Downtown San Diego
- $5 - $10
Dr. Frankenstein’s Traveling Freakshow, Tin Shed Theatre Company
The Fringe’s “Off Broadway” space is the stage of the Spreckels Theatre. Tiers of folding chairs, their backs to the house seats, provide an intimate atmosphere.
Tin Shed, from the United Kingdom, presents an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel acted by “freaks.” The Master of Ceremonies, Julius M. Barker (Justin Cliffe) may be the biggest freak of all: a functionally insane sadist, he directs his cast like the Marquis de Sade at Charenton asylum, but with more vigor and brutality.
His “cast” includes Bethilda the Bearded Lady (Georgina Harris), who needs flickering electroshock treatment to get into character, Sangieve (Antonio Rimola), part-lobster, part-mind reader (who can read the mind of a lobster — or can he?), and The Monster (Aled Wyn-Thomas), who looks a lot like Dr. Frankenstein’s original, Until he speaks his speeches trippingly and swears he’s been miscast.
The piece, which has some lulls in pacing, is a kind of freako-centric tribute to Vaudeville. Enhanced by silhouettes on a rear curtain, the performers expertly bang into each other, mug clichéd expressions, and create oversized slapstick. And the show, ever about to fall apart (whence cometh much of the humor), goes on, prodded by the M.C.’s relentless cruelty (imagine Rocky Horror’s Dr. Frank N. Furter on meth).
What Tin Shed does may not appeal to all tastes. But they do what they do quite well.
SD Fringe: Peacock and the Nightingale
- Tenth Avenue Arts Center, 930 Tenth Avenue, East Village
- $5 - $10
The Peacock and the Nightengale, by David Bottomly
Dame Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) blamed her “prickly” childhood, in part, on her parents. “They were too young when they married,” she told an interviewer in 1959, “and didn’t know anything about life.”
For that reason, she refused to attend her mother’s funeral.
She was six feet tall. Her look — head wrapped in a turban, long, dark velvet, Elizabethan-styled dresses, flaunted jewelry — became as recognizable as her experimental poetry. In all things, she was an outsider. Fiercely so.
In 1954, while touring Hollywood for a magazine article, her editors arranged a meeting with Sitwell’s exact opposite, he thought: Marilyn Monroe, Tinseltown’s reigning pin-up Venus. The editors assumed they’d hate each other on sight. Surely a catfight of Nietzchean proportions would ensue.
The Peacock and the Nightingale
Not so. Sitwell detected a “strangely tragic” glint in her face “like a beautiful ghost.. and the vegetation spirit of Ophelia.”
Monroe was delighted to drop her image as a boulder-dumb ingénue and talk books and ideas. For half an hour, they chatted about the Austrian “anthro-philosopher” Rudolf Steiner.
The meeting’s a neat idea for a one-act play. Bring them on, break down barriers, set them free.
Bottomly’s script promises to show the real Sitwell “behind the shades” and Marilyn, too. But it’s a full, cover-to-cover rewrite away.
The director George Cukor is filming the meeting. For unknown reasons, Sitwell and Monroe are scripted. The piece takes too much time with this device: word choices, missing a line, rewriting. At one point, as if commenting on the text, Cukor says “let’s get this back on track.” He’s right, since the play rambles without a through-line.
It’s also predictable, and spouts time-worn clichés about Hollywood (“the studios are god”; “why can’t love be more like it is in the movies?”).
The performances are uneven. Loie Gail really looks like Sitwell, though she could trill her R’s less and be less external. Rhianna Basore really looks like Monroe, though her accent wavers toward French. Credit the accuracy to Mallory Devlin’s “costume alterations”: Sitwell a pillar of black velvet; Monroe all in white with high-grade platinum hair.
Comments