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Fringe Festival – The agony and passion of The Artists’ Women

As any student of art history knows, many great male artists had more than one woman in their lives – and not just because of sexual extra-curriculars. “The Artists’ Women,” (last performances today, September 16th at the Philadelphia Art Alliance) brings alive the idea of woman as Muse (L’Egerie), exploring the lives of the women who were entangled, artistically and otherwise, with the likes of Fra Filippo Lippi, Duchamp, Picasso and Dali. The central character in this world-premiere script from University of the Arts theater grad and YeuxVeuxBelle Collective co-founder Annie Such is sculptor Camille Claudel (Shannon Remley). Claudel, entwined ... More » »

Fringe Festival – Antony and Cleopatra in Tahrir Square at the Penn Museum

This year’s Fringe Festival puts Antony and Cleopatra right back where we’ve imagined them for centuries: in front of a limestone Sphinx, flanked by the massive columns of an ancient Egyptian palace. Not a set design by an ambitious designer — this staging of the Shakespearean drama takes place in front of the real artifacts in the Penn Museum’s famous Sphinx Gallery. Antony and Cleopatra: Infinite Lives is a  play-within-a-play that brings Shakespeare’s historical tragedy and the contemporary uprisings in Egypt into a roiling mix. The production melds the bard’s original with a script by Pete Barry and J. Michael DeAngelis ... More » »

Fringe Festival – ComedySportz’s Cecily and Gwendolyn probe the audience for laughs

“Let the probe commence!” cry Cecily and Gwendolyn, time-traveling Victorian social anthropologists, played by Kelly Jennings and Karen Getz. Just whom do they plan to probe? The audience, of course. Part of the ComedySportz improv troupe offerings at the Adrienne, Cecily (Jennings) and Gwendolyn (Getz) are collecting data on modern life and recruiting audience members as their ethnographers, ethnopictologists, and key informants. In colorful contemporary tops and voluminous red-belted white petticoats, the two begin communing with the audience in ripe British accents long before the show actually starts, avidly questioning ticket-buyers’ choice of seats and offering “biscuits” to lobby loiterers. Bouncing ... More » »

Fringe Festival – PuppeTyranny’s outer space romp Iminami

Last year, PuppeTyranny writer/director C.W. Kennedy unleashed one of the most surreal yet engrossing shows of the 2011 Fringe Festival. “Water Bears in Space” followed the fantastic journey of a family of tiny tardigrades, also known as Water Bears – moss-dwelling creatures whose size tops out at 1.5 millimeters, and who have become notable to modern science for having survived unprotected trips into outer space. This year, Kennedy brings her eye for offbeat storytelling to PuppeTyranny’s Iminami, running through September 21 at Greensaw Design’s Northern Liberties warehouse as part of the Philly Fringe Festival. While the biggest tsunami known to ... More » »