Picks for June

Pasadena Playhouse has finally hit its stride and I’m excited to see the classic George C. Wolfe musical, Jelly’s Last Jam, open June 2nd through June 23rd.

The Geffen Playhouse has brought back Helder Guimarães for his latest one-man magic show (wrapped in a story) — The Hope Theory — playing through June 30th. It's good for your friends who might not sit through a whole play but still want a good story.

It’s also time for the Hollywood Fringe. In one way, the fringe is the place to find the raw energy that previously permeated most of LA’s intimate theaters. That’s both a good thing and a complicated thing — LA theater has changed. Putting on a show is a higher-stakes affair now. So it’s great to see that "Hey, what the hell, let’s put on a show" energy. But it can be hit or miss. My advice and context from last year still holds — see below.

This is Anthony Byrnes opening the curtain on LA theater for KCRW.

Did the pandemic make the Hollywood Fringe Festival relevant?

[Written last year for Fringe 2023 but it's even truer this year.]

If you've been reading or listening to me for a while, you know I haven't historically been a fan of the Hollywood Fringe Festival. It's not that I don't love Fringe festivals (I do). It's just that I was never really sure how a Fringe festival fit into Los Angeles theater.

The pandemic may have changed all that.

If you've never been to a Fringe festival, I'll point you back to how I described it in 2018:

If you've never done the Fringe, it's like doing a tasting menu with a drunk chef. Everything happens quickly, some things are brilliant, some experiments are catastrophes, and almost everything goes better with a wine pairing.

The idea behind the Hollywood Fringe Festival (like most Fringe festivals) is quantity and compression. It's a lot of small shows (many less than an hour), playing throughout a couple of miles of Hollywood, and scheduled so you can see two or three shows on the same day. The fun of the Fringe is the tasting menu experience — not one singular remarkable thing but a variety of interesting things, one after the other. To get that experience, you need to make a day of it — or at least a full evening — and see at least three shows. The hardest part is the sheer volume of shows. Picking what you want to see and scheduling them so you don't have any overlap can be difficult. 

A lot of this still holds true (especially the wine pairing).

My pre-pandemic gripe with the Hollywood Fringe was: Where did it fit in LA theater? With a hearty 99-seat theater scene and other theater opportunities galore, wasn't all of LA's intimate theater really just one big, year-round Fringe festival? Wasn't the Fringe Festival just serving the faithful in smaller and smaller doses and offering quantity over quality? LA's version of the Fringe didn't seem to be growing an audience for theater more broadly and it lacked the national or international draw of other Fringe festivals. This wasn't a chance to see the best of Fringe from across the circuit of national or international festivals, it was a predominately local festival. My biggest complaint accompanied the best shows. More than once I saw something incredible at Fringe that played a couple of performances and then vanished. As I said back in 2012, "I love the ephemeral nature of the theater as much as the next guy, but shouldn’t there be something more?"

What, I asked smugly, was really the point?

Well, things have changed.

Post-pandemic, LA Theater looks very different. Between the loss of theater companies, reduced schedules at LA's intimate theaters, and the increased cost of producing at those venues (thanks to everything from losing the 99-seat agreement to AB5), LA's vibrant and abundant intimate theater scene feels a little more sparse.

Now the prospect of a low barrier-to-entry, come-one-come-all format, and the consolidation of time and geography feels like a breath of fresh air. Mind you, this isn't so much that the Hollywood Fringe has succeeded, it's more that the rest of LA's theater has constricted making the Fringe more vital. 

All the challenges that existed with the Fringe Festival then still exist now. But LA now needs a Fringe to take up what 99-seat theater has lost.

So be brave, do your best with the fringe schedule, pick a couple of nights between June 13th and 30th, and take a chance on shows that might be magical experiences or glorious failures, the future of LA's intimate theater might depend on it.