Fringe Fest 1

[naomikritzer]

This week is the Fringe Festival. The Minnesota Fringe includes a "Kid Fringe," made up of kid-friendly, young-audience-appropriate plays. Today we took the girls to see "Hansel and Gretel: The Musical" at Jeune Lune.

The girls liked it, but I have definitely seen better Fringe shows. It opened with an interminable funeral scene. Gretel had a really long solo, and while she had an excellent voice for a kid her age, there's a reason that Broadway musicals don't generally open with lengthy solos or, for that matter, funeral scenes. This was followed by a scene in which some other kid got all worried about her mother dying, in which the mother responded by singing another lengthy song about dying and flying off on angels' wings.

The play was being put on by a theater school from Plymouth, MN, and so there were a whole lot of extra characters. The flying-off-on-angel-wings mother and daughter turned up again repeatedly later on; since they were clearly well-fed and cheerful while Hansel and Gretel were being starved and abused by their evil stepmother and clueless impoverished father, I interpreted them as the neighbors who dutifully went to the funeral but then couldn't be bothered to notice the need and desperation right in front of their eyes.

There were kind of two shows going on simultaneously, though. One was set in the town, centered on Hansel and Gretel, and was slow-moving and occasionally treacly. The other was set in the woods, centered on a misfit biker-boy wolf who'd been raised by a pack of neon-colored Hershey's Kisses (OK, they were supposed to be birds) and was much more entertaining. Everything that happened in the woods was reasonably interesting, actually: there was also a dance of the Creepy Reaching Shadows that was well-done, and the witch was fabulous, though the big bad wolf and his pack of big bad cool kids was by far the best part of the show.

I should note that the girls liked it a lot, and Ed liked the Hansel and Gretel parts better than I did.

Oh, there was also a white bird who was maybe kind of the ghost of Hansel and Gretel's mom who came to them and comforted them while they were lost in the woods. And then led them to the house of the child-eating wicked witch. I'm not sure what the scriptwriter thought we should make of that.

We have plans to go to more shows without the kids, and my mother wants to take the girls to see some shows this week, too.

Comments

[notthatedburke.livejournal.com]

Neon colored Hershey's kisses. Oh, that really does capture what they looked like pretty well.

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

The bird who comforts H&G in the woods and then bizarrely leads them to the witch's house is in the Humperdinck opera version, too (which is possibly the schmaltziest Hansel & Gretel ever).

[naomikritzer]

Does it also have a wolf who was raised by birds? I wonder if they performed an abridged form of that version?

[sylvia-rachel.livejournal.com]

Not that I recall. And now that I think about it, I don't think it even has the wicked stepmother: I'm pretty sure H&G have both parents at the beginning, and the mother is just really, really cranky from all the grinding poverty and such.

It does have a Dance of the Gingerbread Children at the end, because the witch's house has a fence made of giant gingerbread children, and when Gretel shoves the witch into the oven they all come back to life.