fringe: nice work if you can get it

The downside to the Fringe is that sometimes you take a chance on something that sounds pretty good, but turns out to be distinctly less than you were expecting.

Conversely, the upside tends to be that you haven't spent all that much money to see the show, and most of the time they only last an hour.

Which brings me around to the first show I saw last night, Nice Work If You Can Get It by The Lost Rung.

Unfortunately it was very much a show that was less than it was supposed to be.

First off, the lighting. When I got to the venue (which happened to be the same venue as Macbeth), there were no lights in the theatre... there were lights outside in the corridor, but the theatre itself was pitch black. Now for a show with a completely different vibe to this one, sitting there in the dark could have been the perfect way to enter into the show before it started... unfortunately this wasn't the show for that.

And once the show started I really just wanted there to be more light. Especially since it's set in an office building... it should have been overly bright, all encompassing light. But it wasn't.

It also seemed to be a show that was trying to be a few too many things... is it singing, is it dancing, is it acrobatics, is it acting... and I didn't feel that it concentrated on the strengths of the two performers, dance and acrobatics.

What I'd really expected was almost an hour of dance and acrobatics with a very combative feel... what I got was a show that wandered through most of the performing arts and felt a little soft around the edges.

That's not to say that the show was without it's merits... any show that starts with one of it's cast standing there in a pair of black trunks/boxerbriefs certainly has my attention. And both of the stars, Josh Mitchell and Adam Jackson are good at what they do, plus quite attractive to boot.

But there was also the occasional problem of the lighting, where, if there had been more of it, the moves that they were using could actually have been seen.

And the show had a distinctly homoerotic vibe... the Fringe Guide said that the show featured "the machinations and manipulations of two office workers who will risk everything to climb the corporate ladder", but for a lot of the time it felt like they were looking after each other and caring for each other rather than acting as combatants.

Not that that didn't appeal to me... and I could have been reading more into it than was actually there. I maybe would have preferred to see a show where they explored that.

There's a beautiful piece towards the end that feels both aggressive and kinda sexual where they spend the whole time alternately gripping each other's ties and supporting each other's entire body on that one piece of cloth (see the image at the top of the post).

There were a few laughs (but only kinda small ones), but overall it just all felt a bit disjointed and I came away somewhat disappointed.

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