Minnesota Fringe Festival: "Five-Fifths of Back to the Future" at the Cowles Center

My favorite kick-off event for my favorite theater festival is back! I can't recall if the Minnesota Fringe Festival did their annual Five-Fifths fundraiser last spring (and they certainly didn't do it the two years before that), but if they did I didn't go. I attended this delightfully fringey event in which five Fringe companies interpret one-fifth of a popular movie the five years prior to the pandemic (which resulted in one entirely virtual Fringe and one mostly virtual Fringe, before they returned to a fully in-person festival last fall). This year they once again picked one of my favorite movies from my youth - Back to the Future. I hadn't seen it in a while so I re-watched it yesterday, which is unnecessary because there's a plot summary in the program. And anyway, it's not really about the movie, it's about seeing what five different groups of artists do with the same prompt. The results are wildly different and ridiculously creative - just like the Fringe Festival is. Mark your calendars for August 3-13, and prepare to get adventurous!

Minnesota Fringe Festival: "Five-Fifths of Mary Poppins" at Park Square Theatre

We're only three months away from the most hectic, exiting, exhausting, wonderful week in #TCTheater: the Minnesota Fringe Festival! This year's festival will take place August 1-11 (with the related Family Fringe happening July 26-28 and August 2-4), but events have been happening all year. May brings one of my favorite Fringe events, the "Five-Fifths" benefit, in which a popular movie is divided into five parts and handed to five Fringe companies for them to interpret as they wish. It's a very clever concept, and one that really showcases what's unique about each company. This year's choice was Mary Poppins, and the results were, as my friend Jules from Minnesota Theater Love succinctly put it, "weird and fun." Just like Fringe!

"Five-Fifths of The Matrix" by Five Minnesota Fringe Festival Companies at ARIA

The first Minnesota Fringe Festival event of 2018 is here! The first one I attend anyway (the lottery happened a few months ago, choosing the lucky companies that get to perform in the festival). The annual "Five-Fifths" fundraiser is when they take an iconic movie, split it up into five parts, hand it over to five Fringe companies, then put the five parts back together again. To say that the end result bears little resemblance to the original goes without saying. But it's great fun, and really gives you a taste of what Fringe is - a display of a wide array of creativity. Mark your calendar for August 2-12, and in the meantime find out how you can get involved (by volunteering, donating, or attending other pre-festival events) at the Fringe website.

Minnesota Fringe Festival: Five-Fifths of Jurassic Park at the Ritz Theater

Hey theater friends, the Minnesota Fringe Festival is less than three months away! The largest unjuried theater festival in the nation begins August 3, runs for 11 days, and usually includes about 170 shows at a dozen or so venues around town. The kick-off event (after the lottery, which was held earlier this year and determined who will perform in the festival) is the annual Five-Fifths show, a fundraiser that showcases all that is wonderful about MN Fringe. The crazy brilliant people at the Fringe take a popular movie, slice it into five parts, and give each part to a company to do a Fringe-style adaptation. Then the five fifths are mashed together to make one crazy whole. It's great ridiculous fun and really gives you a taste of what the Fringe has to offer, in addition to raising money to help "adventurous artists meet adventurous audiences."

Minnesota Fringe Festival: Five-Fifths of Titanic at Illusion Theater

Hey theater friends, did you know that the Minnesota Fringe Festival is less than three months away? I don't know about you, but I'm excited for 11 days of theater binging, standing in lines, eating trail mix for every meal, and little sleep, especially after attending the annual Fringe fundraiser Five-Fifths. The subject of this year's show, in which a popular movie is split into five parts and re-imagined by five different theater companies, is the 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic. Confession: when it came out I was in my early 20s, so pretty much the target audience, and I unironically loved it. I bought the soundtrack and may even still have the VHS tapes (kids - VHS tapes are how we used to watch movies at home before DVDs or Netflix were invented). Now of course I can see that Titanic is an overblown melodramatic mess, but a part of me will always have a soft spot for this make-believe doomed romance set admidst a real disaster. Last night's Fringey interpretation of the movie represented everything we love about the Fringe, and set the stage for another great festival to come!

Minnesota Fringe Festival: Five-Fifths of Dirty Dancing at Illusion Theater

The 2015 Minnesota Fringe Festival kicked off this week with their annual spring fundraiser entitled "Five-Fifths," in which a popular movie is divided into five parts and given to five Fringe companies for their interpretation. This year they chose Dirty Dancing, presumably because it's one of the best movies ever made (that's not sarcasm; a devotion to Dirty Dancing and Patrick Swayze is inherent in anyone who was a teenage girl in the '80s). I could not resist this beloved movie receiving the Fringe treatment by this group of creative and wacky geniuses, and was not disappointed by the result, which was as delightfully bizarre and diverse as the festival itself.

The Huge Founders opened the show, with Mike Fotis (a Fringe legend) in drag as Baby, doing the requisite narration as well as hilarious commentary into a microphone. The five-person cast took us through the introduction to Kellerman's.

Picking up at the famous "I carried a watermelon scene," in which Baby is first exposed to the dancing, was the dance troupe Guittar Productions. They did some pretty cool physical theater things in their part of the retelling.

The baton was then passed to the adorably awkward Carl and Wanda Finkles. Like in their Fringe show last year, the Finkles did their part in a "we're putting on a show!" kind of way. Except that the show they prepared for was that other '80s dance movie Footloose. So they winged it in their own hilarious and original way as we saw the training sequence and the big dance number (a reprise from their last show).

In Mainly Me Productions' segment of the show, it was raining Patrick Swayze (if only!). The "Hey Mickey/Hey Sylvia" crawling on the floor scene was crashed by Patrick Swayze from four of his other movies and the SNL Chippendales sketch, which then turned into a Chippendales dance-off, culminating in the To Wong Fu Patrick Swayze singing "It's Raining Men." The whole thing was hilarious!

Who better to take us into the final big dance number than Bollywood Dance Scene? The Kellerman's talent show was a Bollywood dance-off (on For the Loyal's small sloped hexagonal stage), Johnny declared "nobody puts baby in a corner," and they did the lift!! Then the 30+ dancers came out into the audience for a joyous dance worthy of the spirit of Dirty Dancing.

The 2015 Minnesota Fringe Festival runs from July 30 through August 9. Check out their website for a list of companies (tentatively) scheduled to perform and for further information about the fest.