Musicals! Are! Exciting!

I'm not sure when the craze for exclamatory musical titles began, but there are certainly a lot of them in this year's Fringe Festival. Whether it's Williamsburg!, Show Choir!, BASH'd!, or Bukowsical!, these musicals' creators have named their projects with all the subtlety of a sonic boom.

It would be interesting to poll audiences to see if there is a difference in excitement level and anticipation due to the use of punctuation. In my experience, it actually puts me off a bit, like those overeager people who stop you to take surveys on the streets who are, essentially, walking exclamation points themselves.

But I digress ... Day Two of the Fringe found me at two !!!! musicals.

The first, Williamsburg! The Musical, is a spoof of the hipster-infiltrated Brooklyn neighborhood. Good fun, with some exciting performances and interesting choreography, but waaaaay loud (I actually plugged my ears a few times). It's forgivable, given the Fringe's limited rehearsal time, but wow ... a lot of noise and grit for noon on a Sunday. The people sitting next to me and my friend Tauren had actually brought their two sons (under 10 years old) to the show, which was rather shocking, both because their attention started to fade towards the end and also because the musical featured a healthy heaping of profanity. The finale, for example, kept screaming "It's the F*$%ing Finale!", just to make sure we had gotten the message. It was interesting to note, though, that the boys started getting restless just as my own attention span was maxing out. Even when you're young, you have a sense of when they need to wrap it up. It's good that mature audiences have, for the most part, grown out of the outward signs of boredom, such as dropping toys, murmuring incoherently, and trying to stand up on one's chair to see better.

Anyway. One of my favorite performers I've discovered this year is the fabulous Allison Guinn (I reviewed her earlier this year in The Gallery Players' productions of Urinetown and Victor/Victoria), and she gets to sink her teeth into the leading role in this 'burg. And good heavens--she is a force to behold. Singing down to the gutters and back up to the sky, firmly planting each comic moment, stealing every scene, this girl is going places. I can't wait to see her next show. Even if it's another! exciting! musical!

A few hours later we visited the equally excitable Show Choir! The Musical and had a marvelous time. The audience was electric (and quite sweaty from the heat), and the show is a clever spoof of a genre (or "art form," they argue) that so many of us theater people love to hate--or, let's be honest, hate to love. Face it, there's really no better outlet for teenagers who want to get on stage and express themselves in myriad ways. The creators do a fantastic job capturing the essence of "music in motion," especially in the sparkly, gleaming production numbers ... hooray for jazz squares! The second act gets a bit drippy when the writers veer precariously towards Lifetime movies and their attendant syrup. I'd love to see the show cut down to 90 minutes and tucked into a nifty commercial run. I'd be first in line to see it again. Check out my review and the show's MySpace page.

Still to come: A review of the more sedately monikered Farm Song: The Musical.

Pictured: Shlomo (Evan Shyer) talks Piper (Allison Guinn) down off the (Williamsburg!) Bridge.