REVIEW FROM TURNSTYLENEWS.COM

“I had no intention of seeing The 7th Annual One-Man Show World Championships, mostly for the reason that I didn’t know it existed. Fringe is vast, and I’ll cop to not plunging through the Comedy section of the catalog since I’m usually on the look out for the weird stuff. Luckily Caitlin Rucker, a fixture of Fringe, was outside the Theatre Asylum space as I was standing in line for IamI and she invited me to the show.

If you’ve been to Fringe over the past few years you’ve probably run into Rucker. Sometimes it seems like she’s the board op or stage manager for every show. In the case of The 7th Annual One-Man Show World Championships she’s directing, working with writer/performer Jim Hanna. Hanna is another Fringe fixture, having been a highlight in the large productions that the Orgamsico Theatre Company usually produces. (Don’t worry, we’ll get outside baseball in the next paragraph.) The point is that even with all these factors going for it I didn’t know about the show until an hour before. That’s Fringe in a nutshell.

I am so, so glad Rucker stopped to pitch me the show.

If you’ve ever sat through a hideous, overwrought solo show then 7th Annual is for you. Heck, if you like solo shows then you’re versed enough in the language to get the humor. Hanna is merciless with the genre, and there’s definitely a reading of this work that would see Hanna mocking the contents of some of the “journeys” that the characters go through. The central idea here, however, is to mock the way in which solo shows tend to be formulaic and turn all brands of personal tragedy into universal stories. Even when they shouldn’t be.

The entire cast is spot-on, running with archetypes of solo performers and just nailing their bits. Maybe it all helped to have an enthusiastic audience who was willing to buy into the fiction that we were there to watch the championships, which actually made some of the pre-programmed audio cues redundant. Maybe I just needed to laugh after checking the time about 600 times during the previous show and counting the number of projected stars on the ceiling.

All I know is that I haven’t laughed that hard and long in a while, and I certainly haven’t cried from laughing at a Fringe show in ages.

The other thing I know is that I want Hanna to write more and Rucker to direct more. Whatever these two have going on next I’ll be there."

—Noah J. Nelson