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2026 Audience Reviews
Member Reviews
The following reviews were submitted by Fringe Member: Brian Harmon
Company: One T Productions
Show: After the End
Venue: Mixed Blood
Playing with Fire
Scot Frielich is a charismatic performer with a nice stage presence who was highly engaging throughout this entire performance. The problem is that when you set the stakes as high as he does (being the last man on earth and all) it makes it very difficult to rise to the moment you've created. He has some genuinely nice insights about loss, but I think they would have resonated much better under less grandiose circumstances (like an unwanted divorce, sudden displacement, etc.). But under the backdrop of the end of human life, those insights don't fire as well. I also think this would have played better if staged more intimately; he spent most of his time toward the back of the stage, which mystified me a bit. A more intimate setting would have also eliminated the sound problems he had during his songs. Lots to like here, but I felt the bar was placed much too high for him to be successful with the material he had.
Company: The Miller Conspiracy
Show: Bay Creek
Venue: Barbara Barker Center for Dance
Lots of Potential, Falls Short
I had a hard time sticking with this show. Miller is obviously an accomplished performer, and the world into which he invites us is genuinely interesting. But the structure of the writing and the performance made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the world he envisions. First, it's a bit of a climb to do a storytelling show when setting up a situation where the storyteller is reluctant to tell the stories. The drama this situation creates did not compensate for the lack of clarity it presents. Second, this story is highly dependent on a wide variety of flashbacks, and it's tricky to pull that off without taking special care to keep a focus that keeps the piece on track. I thought it fell down here - we had several characters with very similar names in flashbacks that covered a wide variety of time. At one moment, we are 70 years ago, at another we're 20 years ago, then we're a few weeks ago. I had trouble keeping it all straight and eventually quit caring. My attention started wondering and I was gone. It would have been nice to have an anchor (perhaps in the present) to which we returned to help us keep everything straight. Some variation in the nature of the performance between flashbacks might have also helped. I loved the idea, but it felt to me that it just kept getting in its own way. I wanted to like this more than I did.