Five More Shows We've Caught at the Hollywood Fringe Festival BY LYLE ZIMSKIND
June 10, 2017
Set in some San Bernardino County suburban nowheresville (rather than in the titular sin city), Brendan Beseth’s long one-act A Vegas Kind of Love gives us a steamy love quadrangle with richly drawn characters and a pervasive noir atmosphere.
Nadiya Geldenhuys is the unnamed bad girl with a shady past and three different men crazy for her. Nebbishy yet upstanding Leo (Matt Doherty) brings her back from Vegas to live with him and offers a secure home and respectability, plus maybe a car if she plays her cards right, even though she demurs from sleeping with him. Their more aggressively virile neighbor Frank (Nicolas Read), provides her a sexual go-to during the days when Leo’s at work and entreats her to run off with him because she “needs a real man around her, somebody like me.” Leroy a.k.a. Slim (Kofi Boakye) is the hardened criminal boyfriend she’s left Vegas to get away from. As the play progresses, some of these dynamics shift.
There’s also a detective (Henry LeBlanc) sitting at
