Mein Comps, which features the character of an iconoclastic aspiring actor named Adolf Moira Angela Hitler, was performed at this year's Milwaukee Fringe Festival.
This year’s Milwaukee Fringe Festival was marked by a number of smaller-stage successes. Opening day, the Todd Wehr Theater featured three intimate performances. The soft-spoken John Schneider’s Where or When was a classy and touching tribute to composer Lorenz Hart with piano accompaniment by Connie Grauer that garnered a well-deserved standing ovation.
Shortly after Schneider’s performance, stage veteran Elizabeth Fuller took the stage portraying herself, a septuagenarian and a clown looking to address matters of survival. Intermittent sparks of wisdom from Fuller were well-received. The most provocative performance of the evening was Tyler Anthony Smith in the role of iconoclastic aspiring actor Adolf Moira Angela Hitler in Mein Comps. The character’s cripplingly vulnerable diva-dictator fusion played like cleverly-obscured satire on the current U.S. President.
A Fool’s Enigma Productions closed-out the Todd Wehr Theater’s end of the festival with a preview of J.J. Gatesman’s starkly romantic The Beauty of Psyche. The retelling of the ancient story placed a thoughtful Abigail Stein in the title role of a woman incarcerated by Josh Decker as the fragile god Cupid who has fallen in love with her. The romance vexes his mother Venus, played with cold divinity by Audrey Thompson-Wallace. The show opened with irresistibly playful opening narration by a magnetic Kellie Wambold as the god Pan, who later encounters Psyche as her quest begins. It was an engrossing preview of a promising new show opening next month.
The Milwaukee Fringe Arts Festival successfully closed its third annual one-weekend-only celebration of smaller-stage fare. For more information on the festival, visit mkefringe.com.
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J.J. Gatesman’s The Beauty of Psyche gets a full staging next month at the Arcade Theatre in the Underground Collaborative (Sep. 6-15). For more information on this and more coming to the UC, visit ucmke.com
