Review Rundown: Hollywood Fringe ’24 & More

Summer festival season is upon us, and that means a steady drumbeat of experiments and outdoor adventures. So let’s get into it.

Catch even more in last week’s edition.

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Approximately 900 Feet (Approximately) — Mandela Ltd. & Co
$25, Hollywood, through June 30

A walking tour that mythologizes the Theatre Row district as Music Row in the late 60’s, Approximately 900 Feet (Approximately) tells the story of a doomed girl group whose brief shot at fame goes up in flames in more ways than one.

The show takes the form of following the group’s one time roadie along Santa Monica Blvd. as he weaves the history of the group, named The Cock Eyed Ladies of Leisure, illustrating the story with the help of a scrapbook left to our tour group by the guide who dipped out to take a call before things could kick off.

To be blunt: this one fell flat for me. There’s a lot of story here, and while it’s anchored at points with a few touches that play on the local geography there’s just not all that much theatrical juice in walking around the neighborhood and having someone tell you a story.

There are ways to do what the creators are setting out to do — enchant a neighborhood with a legend — but it takes more than “theatre of the mind” style storytelling. With as long as the walk is, there are opportunities galore for the team to create moments of surprise and wonder, but none of them are seized. So instead everything comes down to the storytelling, which cursory searches online after the fact seems to be spun up out of whole cloth instead of crafted out of bits and pieces of local history reimagined.

Who knows, maybe some of the landmarks mentioned in the story were real, but if so those too are lost to history. If it is totally fictional — and I’m thinking it is — then it just becomes strange as in practice the space and the story aren’t really doing much to support each other.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

Cycult — Shadow Traffic
NYC; free, event closed

Cycult was a participatory experience in the vein of the Idiotorod or Rental Car Rally, in which participants organize around a stylized art vehicle and then travel to checkpoints completing silly challenges. In Cycult, you were asked to create a cult and then use bikes to ride between checkpoints to prove the superiority of your beliefs. About 60 participants dressed up in costumes, hopped on bicycles, and performed wacky tests of cult devotion from 10pm to about 3am.

Shadow Traffic organizes a number of events such as this, including the venerable Lost Horizon Night Market, characterized by anarchic creativity and a carnival-like spirit. They are very good at putting these experiences and Cycult was no exception. Launching from Prospect Park, teams included a horde of a dozen or so Bees, a Ranch Dividian cult (worshiping crudité and ranch dressing), a skating cult that rewarded enlightenment with more wheels, and my group of disco fanatics, the Saturday Night Believers. The challenges ranged from silly bike races or sumo wrestling someone in an inflatable suit to telling the story of your cult or trying to recruit random strangers to join your faith.

This was the first year of Cycult so there were some kinks. Most of the checkpoints could only be done by one or two groups at a time which led to queues of people waiting; better route planning could have reduced idle time. Some of the checkpoints felt demeaning, like they were using your desire for points to torture you to do something humiliating. But mostly it was a blast. Any time you got to roleplay your cult was a lot of fun, whether you were facing down a dominatrix with your faith or revealing your worst crime to your followers. A checkpoint at a pizza place was endless fun in terms of recruiting strangers — I really wish they had given us more active public checkpoints to milk that experience. And there’s a pure joy to biking around the city in costume and spotting another costumed cult riding your direction.

Maybe this is just my kind of weird, but I’m always drawn to things that transform the city in wacky ways. That’s the stuff Shadow Traffic excels at. Cycult was a beautiful burst of sleep-deprived craziness and inventiveness. Check it or another Shadow Traffic event when you can. It will restore your faith in creativity of others.

— Nicholas Fortugno, New York Correspondent

Did I Just Join A Cult? — Lawrence Meyers
$15, Hollywood, through June 30th

Originally I wasn’t going to review this one, as it isn’t a piece of immersive or interactive theatre but is instead a monologue ABOUT immersive theatre. Specifically about 2016’s The Tension Experience, the seminal horror themed show from director Darren Lynn Bouseman (Repo! The Genetic Opera, Spiral: From The Book of Saw) that galvanized the LA immersive scene with its mix of alternate reality game tactics that blurred the line between fantasy and reality.

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Larry Meyers’ entry into the immersive scene in LA was as one of the fans of Tension, and in this one hour piece he does an excellent job of condensing the manic vibes that Tension engendered in its audience. As it stands, Did I Just Join A Cult is the most efficient way to understand just how and why Tension became an obsession for so many that Spooky Season and why its influence on the form, particularly in LA, is still felt the better part of a decade later.

It also doesn’t hurt that Meyers is a solid craftsman as a writer, and from start to finish the piece does not flag as he gets pulled deeper down the rabbit hole of the fictitious cult at the heart of Tension.

While rooted in Larry’s personal journey with the show, the monologue is more a subjective oral history of a moment and retelling of Tensions narrative than it is navel gazing. Though we get some of that too. Of all the one man shows I’ve seen at Fringe and its ilk over the years this one commits the fewest sins of self-indulgence, to the point where I couldn’t name you one even if I was pressed to by a very sweary British man.

Verdict: if you’ve always wondered what the big deal with The Tension Experience was, whether you were around in the LA immersive scene in 2016 or came here after, this has your answers.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

Gameshow! Gameshow! Gameshow! — Wirelesstaco Productions
$5–15, Hollywood, through June 30

I’m kinda torn about this one, to be honest.

Host Joe Pisanzio leads the audience, split into two teams, through a series of trivia questions, physical challenges, and at one point even a collectively played racing video game. All in all it plays out more like a game night with strangers — or with groups of strangers who otherwise know each other — rather than as a cohesive show with some kind of readily emergent theme.

At one point the lights changed and a music cue hit and Pisanzio elevated the moment into one loaded with mystery, before a simple choice just turned into positive or negative points for one squad or the other. Then it was back to general clowning around. Which is apt, as Pisanzio is a professional clown, and the room clearly had a few other clowns and clown adjacent folks in it.

I can see this as a great palate cleanser in a day of hard Fringing, while rolling with a crew — possibly a crew from your own show. Less so if its the only thing you’re doing that night and you’re not particularly in the mood to play games with strangers. Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m not. This month has been an “I’m not,” although the collective car racing game brought the playful part of me to the surface because we all equally had something to do.

Mostly I found myself wishing it was tighter somehow. Either through presentation — Pisanzio keeps it loose and friendly, seemingly making up parts of the structure on the fly — or by having more truly weird moments that showcase Pisanzio as a performer. He’s got a real vibe, and I wanted more of that.

But this isn’t that show. It’s really just a place for folks — in this case theatre kids — to blow off steam and goof around for an hour for about the cost of a drink. Which in the grand scheme of things is more good than bad, and maker knows 95% of the audience I was with were fully invested and having a grand old time. I imagine if I was rolling with a couple of friends and coming off a round in the nearby Broadwater Plunge I would have been too.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

Shakespeare Inc. — Gold Cap Productions
$15, Hollywood, through June 26

This is one of those cases when the final show would have been better off for not trying to wedge interaction in.

Shakespeare Inc. is a cleverly written modern comedic pastiche of multiple Shakespeare plays — Hamlet, As You Like It, Midsummer, and Macbeth — set inside the marketing firm Denmarketing where the CEO has just died and his son, the “Prince of Photoshop” has returned to find something rotten is going on.

That is until Rosalind shows up and he has to make a choice whether to accept a message from his dead dad or chase after the cute account executive. His choice becomes our choice, through the old standby of actor judged applause, and for our run it was a jump of the tracks into a hippie tech Midsummer plot where magic is replaced by phone apps. These are cheeky comic swings that could easily fall flat, but the cast is game and the writing sharp enough with its puns and wordplay that the beats land.

It took us about thirty minutes of the allotted hour to slalom through the plot and reach an ending. At which point the actors went back to one and pushed us into the first alternate choice path, albeit at a quicker speed as the clock was ticking. This happened two more times, for a total of four endings. Which was honestly two endings too many.

By running through big parts of the possible pathways — I won’t presume that we saw every possibility of the branching narratives — the impact of the audience’s choices were nullified. Which means we might as well have not made them in the first place and instead gotten two — four cleverly constructed Shakespearean pastiches, or one big one, that didn’t pause the action. Instead of a sense of endless possibility and leaving wondering just how many endings there might be, I left feeling like there were four tracks that the company really wanted us to see. So why not do just that?

Verdict: if you enjoy seeing people play with Shakespearean characters and tropes, this is a fine hour of entertainment. If you’re looking for an interactive story where your choices matter, look elsewhere.

— Noah Nelson, Publisher and Podcast Host

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