For those of you who missed some shows you were dying to see at Fringe 2010, Theatre Asylum has given them new life this month and next. Check them out!

__

THEATRE ASYLUM’S BEST OF THE FRINGE
July and August 2010

The 1st annual Hollywood Fringe Festival has ended, but we at Theatre Asylum/Combined Artform are not willing to let it go. So as is traditional with most fringe festivals, we will be presenting the Theatre Asylum’s Best of the Fringe. Come and see the shows with the best reviews, awards and audience raves that you may have missed during the Fringe. It is exciting to be able to extend such a wide range of performances and we will be adding more shows throughout the month. Don’t miss this limited run of the Best of the Fringe. Hope to see you at the Asylum.

Featuring:

T-O-T-A-L-L-Y! (Winner of Top of the Fringe & LA Weekly GO!) In this powerful one hour theater piece, Kimleigh Smith takes the audience through a journey that is totally uplifting, totally heartbreaking, and totally powerful. T-O-T-A-L-L-Y! is the ultimate cheer. It will have you howling in your seats in hysteria and clutching your heart. Kimleigh inspires audiences through her hilarious and honest story to embrace their inner superheroes and find the strength to move forward no matter what. The cheer “That’s Okay, That’s Alright…get back up and Fight, Fight, Fight!” has an entirely different meaning once you see T-O-T-A-L-L-Y. 7/10 @ 8:00 PM, 7/18 @ 7:00 PM , 7/ 24 @ 8:00 PM , 7/31 @ 8:00 PM.
Buy Tickets – $16

KILL YOUR TELEVISION. (Most Socially Aware Show, LA Weekly GO! & Backstage Critic’s Pick) Writer-performer Jeff Gardner’s dialogue-free solo comedy with a hilarious and insightful look at the insidious nature of television. It’s often said he who has the remote control has the power. Not in this living room…take a bizarre plunge into the other side of the screen and discover why they call it “Programming.” An exciting hybrid of pop-culture satire, physical theatre and the absurd. 7/17 @ 8pm, 7/23 @ 8PM, 7/31 @ 6:30PM and 8/14 @ 6PM.
Buy Tickets – $12

THE BAD ARM – CONFESSIONS OF A DODGY IRISH DANCER (LA Weekly GO! & Backstage Critic’s Pick) is an uproarious one-woman play by London-Irish dancer-performer Máire Clerkin. Amid astounding bursts of rhythm and physical theatre, this ugly-duckling-never-quite-swan recounts her experiences of sex and booze and rock and roll like only a convent-educated Irish catholic girl can. If you thought all Irish dancers were curly-haired cutie-pies with perfect posture, meet a scowling misfit from London in this outrageous antidote to Riverdance. 7/24 @ 6:30PM
Buy Tickets – $15

THE WASTE LAND (LA Weekly GO!). Filament Theatre Co. presents a workshop performance of The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Using the text, 5 actors create a symbiosis between found objects and movement to create a series of broken images, water, rock, Stetson, Jerusalem, trams, Thames, clairvoyance, secretaries, unreal. 7/17 @ 2pm, 7/24 @ 10:00pm, 7/31 @ 7:00pm, 8/7 @ 8:00pm
Buy Tickets – $10

55 MINUTES OF SEX, DRUGS AND AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION (LA Weekly GO!). Smoke ‘em! Drink ’em! Shoot ’em up! You choose one of the 20 “naughty bits” and nervous making topics and we tell fast, funny, emotionally honest stories of the pleasures of forbidden love, wretched excess, reckless living, potent language, and making a good confession. We’ve got strippers, junkies, gamblers, trannies, getting oral, getting physical, getting it over with. When the music stops one lucky audience member picks a topic from the fish bowl and joins us on stage as an active participant in the story. No holds barred! 7/29, 30 & 31 @ 9:30pm, 7/31 @ 3pm
Buy Tickets – $15

THEY CALL ME MISTER FRY, the critically-acclaimed one-man show written by and starring Jack Fry and directed by Jeff Michalski which has run for more than 2 years in Los Angeles and performed to critical acclaim, standing ovations and sold out houses across the country including a 3 month extended off-Broadway run at the Comic Strip Live Theater, 2 command performances for the Dept. of Ed. in Washington DC, and endorsed by Stephen Colbert on the The Colbert Report. Selected One of the Best of the Fest and the BEST MALE MONOLOGUE from DC theater Critics in the 2009 Washington Cap Fringe Festival. 7/11 @ 3pm, 7/24 @3pm, 7/31 @ 8:00pm, 8/7 @ 3pm.
Buy Tickets – $15

MY PENIS – IN AND OUT OF TROUBLE. Bill O’Reilly calls him a sexual extremist, and Dennis Miller wants to punch him in the nose. Solo Performer and two-time Best In Fringe Festival winner at the New York International Fringe Festival, Antonio Sacre performs at the inaugural Hollywood Fringe with “My Penis – in and out of Trouble,” a 60 minute solo performance piece directed by Paul Stein. Thursdays 7/15 – 8/5 @ 8pm. Tickets $15. http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/118963
ZOMBIÉNCE! – An Improvised Zombie Musical. With the audiences’s help, the Improvatorium Players create a unique musical tale of mankind facing off with the undead! Every show is it’s own opening and closing night as the story is never the same. Under the direction of Patrick Bristow, Improvatorium takes on it’s biggest challenge to date. You don’t want to miss this high wire act of improvisational daring, comedy, music and horror. 7/9, 16, 23, 30 & 8/6 , 13, 20 & 27 @ 8pm.
Buy Tickets – $10

TAXI STORIES. An 80 minute one-person show in which the author/actor, David O’Shea, recounts stories from his seven year tenure as a NYC taxi driver during the 1970’s and early 80’s. This is NYC of Ed Koch, when homeless slept on cardboard boxes in front of the abandoned Apollo theatre, Time Square was filled with three-card monte players, tall transvestite hookers, and midnight cowboys, and “Pac-Man” was a brand new video game. 7/9 @ 8pm, 7/16 @ 8pm, 7/24 @ 5pm, 8/14 @ 8pm
Buy Tickets – $15

NANO NATION Poor Dog Group’s NANO NATION is an investigation of the American Myth. As with many folkloric creations, the piece deals with the creation and dissolution of power. In the performance we encounter a women who, after having managed to free herself from Male-centric forms of domination, begins to scrutinize her own origins by considering her female heritage. She realizes that her descent, her own folklore and derivation, have attached themselves to her as a physiological inscription of the past and that if she is intends to explore that mythic formation she must focus on their resting place: her own body. July 9th @ 9:30, July 16th @ 9:30 and July 24th at 10:00.
Buy Tickets – $10

BONNIE IN BRIGHTON. The US Premiere of this moving and funny one-woman show about a Texan girl’s unconventional adventures in a British seaside town. This hit coming-of-age story has already wowed British audiences. Part travelog, part love-letter to a city, the show explores the idea that sometimes you have to pretend to be someone else to find out who you really are. Winner Best Female Performer Brighton Festival. Sundays 7/18, 8/1, 8 & 15 @ 7pm , 7/25 @ 5:30pm.
Buy Tickets – $10

LOS ANGELYNE. Written and Performed by Katherine Saltzberg. In this autobiographical theater piece, the personal becomes public as Katherine recounts how L.A. icon Angelyne-the queen of billboard self promotion-invaded her family. Thursdays 7/29, 8/5, 12, 19 @ 8pm
Buy Tickets – $10

All shows are at Theatre Asylum and Lab located at 6320 Santa Monica Blvd. Hollywood, CA 90038.
Tickets are available at www.brownpapertickets.com or 800-838-3006. See website for scheduling and ticket prices. www.theatreasylum-la.com and www.combinedartform.com/bestofthefringe.htm.

When we began this whole thing we had several goals in mind, many of which were realized during our first fringe. I am happy to report we can check off two more…

• Post-Fringe partnershops between Hollywood venues
• Extensions of Fringe Shows past June

Our Fringe International Award winning show “Burton” starring the inimitable Rhodri Miles as Richard Burton has been extended under an unprecedented partnership between Theatre Asylum and Theatre of NOTE. One amazing show, two amazing venues.

Read all about it (including dates/times/addresses) on Steve Julian’s Blog. Burton plays today through Saturday at Theatre Asylum in Hollywood.

Let’s hear it for community! These are harbingers of great things to come…

Ben

Heyah guys…remember me? We just spent quite a bit of time together doing this thing called The Hollywood Fringe Festival.

I just want to say – and I want the entire community to read it – that you are the most amazing, splendiferous, hard working, committed, fun-loving, caring, empathetic, joyful, spastic, organized, soul enriching bunch of party people son-of-a-bitches I have ever had the fine honor to work alongside.

Each of you has put your jobs, hearts, purses, souls, and bodies on the line to make this happen. And guess what – it happened, BIG. No one in the long history of time – amidst the failures, the shit jobs, the let downs, the disappointments – will ever take this away from you. Don’t let anyone ever make you feel bad about your time here or that it wasn’t 150% worth it. You made magic happen from nothing. What did we have? Five bucks, an idea, and a lot of expendable sweat. And somehow, we pulled it off. Just a bunch of jerks from DC, Iowa, Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond – proof that good friends, good times, and good intensions still matter in this often soul-sucking world of compromise.

You are all beautiful – and without you, we’d all be working in restaurants or cubicles with nothing to give our souls warmth.

And yes, I know I can be a bit eccentric in my management style, thanks for making all the allowances for my own quirks. In seasons of high stress, all our little “foibles” we like to keep hidden come a’ramblin out into our confined, collective breathing space.

You are all invited back next year. As the festival will be a bit different and we have all learned at long last our Fringe strengths and weaknesses, we may be doing different things with our time. I promise to delegate more and guarantee I won’t be such a raving control freak as I trust your sense of commitment 100%.

You made this thing for me, you are my friends, my comrades in arms, and I would happily lead you into the flaming pit of battle any moment of the year.

Stay frosty, Fringe People.

Ben

The 2010 Fringe Festival is over but the Fringe tradition has just begun. Now we begin settlement, navel gazing, and post mortem. Just in case anyone thought we would take a breather, here is our agenda over the next three weeks and beyond…

This Week

• We are now in the process of final festival accounting which includes cutting checks to participants for presales.
• We will also start polling participants for sales numbers and verifying addresses.
• Note that in some cases, your checks will be sent to your venues first.
• Also remember that an 8.5% commission will be deducted from all pre-sales (please tell me this isn’t a surprise)

Next Week

• We launch into some serious internal navel gazing.
• By the week’s end, we hope to produce an annual report including numbers and an internal post-mortem.
• All checks will be mailed to participants (and venues) by the end of next week

The Following Week

• We will host two post mortems: One for venues, One for participants and the community at large.
• We will announce the dates and places of these events asap

The Future

• We intend to hold lots of events where we can keep the community going
• There are a lot of exciting changes coming to the Fringe in 2011, keep your eyes and minds open.

One thing regarding the post-mortem: We are up to hear all your ideas assuming they are presented respectfully (to us and to each other). One thing that’s a question of contention today is the subject of leaving it an “uncurated” festival. This will not change, the Fringe in Hollywood will never turn away projects that have secured a venue and paid their registration.

One change we do intend to make is to make it clear when a partnering venue has decided to curate itself. For example, Theater of NOTE this year programmed its venue with content specific to its aesthetic, while The Complex took all comers who paid rent. We feel our Fringe model (based on Edinburgh Festival Fringe) allows for both standards to exist simultaneously, presenting the benefits of a curated fest with the vastness and opportunities presented in an uncurated fest.

Enjoy!

Ben

Our sincere thanks to our awards sponsors and congratulations to the winners!

Bitter Lemons Awards

The BLOAT (“Bitter Lemons Award for the most Outrageous Theatre”): The Wolf Girls

LATheatreReview.com Awards

Outstanding Contribution to LA Theatre La Fringe Award for Solo Performance – The Most Dangerous Woman in America
Nominees: Brownsville Bred, The Event

Outstanding Contribution to LA Theatre La Fringe Award for Ensemble Performance – Medea
Nominees: The Birthday Boys, The Wolf Girls

Outstanding Contribution to LA Theatre La Fringe Award for International Performers – British Invasion
Nominees: The Packer, Mission of Flowers

Outstanding Contribution to LA Theatre La Fringe Award for Overall Fringe Performance – The Birthday Boys
Nominees: The Wolf Girls, Friends Like These

Get Connected & CMJ Marketing Awards

Tweet Master or Mistress: Rachel Stoll

The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) Awards

The CSPA Fringe Award for Sustainable Production to Presque Pret a Porter, produced by Dreams by Machine, which was Laura Brody.

Principality Production Awards

Most Eccentric Costume: Dylan Jones, show: Pink Champagne
Most Socially Aware Show: Jeff Gardner, show: Kill Your Television