fringe: a nightmare on love street

Generally a have a rule about not seeing anything at the Fringe that starts after about 10pm... it's a rule that I've come to after several bad experiences with late shows.

Add to that the fact that this was the opening night for A Nightmare on Love Street and the audience consisted of perhaps ten people, and this could have been another instance of Late Night Fringe Disaster.

And don't get me wrong, for a lot of the time ANOLS is a hot mess... but if there's one thing that saves it, then that's the two stars, Branden Christine and Kurt Phelan.

I realised about halfway through that I'd seen Branden in the incredibly weird but captivating Carnally, Where Do We Go From Here in 2012 and she's still very easy to watch, even in something as far removed from Carnally as I think you can possibly get.

The show starts with the pair as cross dressed characters escorting the audience (and in my case with Phelan's character Tata personally escorting me in) and then setting up the show premise. Essentially the audience picks five horror movies from a list of ten (well, nine and a mystery option) and then the rest of the show is "Carrie" and "Freddy" acting out these scenes as part of some sort of macabre reality teevee show.

But then with the use of a safe word they transform from the characters in the movie to the reality show characters (with the help of a safe word) and play out wordless little scenes in between.

It's all very hard to explain, and at time, even harder to follow.

However I will say that some of the parody or whatever you may call it of the classic horror movies was spot on, particularly Poltergeist and Carrie.

Plus Phelan looks pretty damn good in his white briefs, the staple wardrobe item for every good looking guy in an 80's horror movie.

On the downside, it's a bit of a mess in parts (I never managed to work out what the mystery movie title was at the end, and it's never mentioned... there just seems to be a lot of running and stabbing and chasing... Battle Royale maybe?)... it's one of the few shows where I actually feared that I might accidentally get hit in the head by a flailing performer (I did get sprayed with water, but that's a completely different story) and given that it's early days there were some technical glitches with some of the props.

And while it all feels like it's going to go pear-shaped any second and the stage is covered with the detritus of more and more props, Christine and Phelan are excellent.

Current Mood: