Jill's PLAF Diary for Wednesday, September 10

Performances: A Priest Walks Into a Bar (Vagabond Acting Troupe) (future performances); Ballad Boys (Aspire Arts) (future performances)

Hard as it might be to believe, I only have one more Fringe diary to do after today. In years past, it's seemed like I've turned out a dozen of them. But I guess that seeing fewer shows, plus having most of my reviews clustered together in a weekend round-up, has made me a bit less prolific. Maybe I should work on that for next year.

A Priest Walks Into a Bar
I'm a member of Vagabond Acting Troupe. But because I had nothing to do with the development or production of this show, and because this is a diary, and not a review, I feel perfectly comfortable recording my impressions here, which basically are these: Priest is a good time. It's also an uneven time. Plays made up of individual vignettes are difficult, and when you add religion into the mix, you're bound to have some scenes that work better than others. I found that I enjoyed the use of often groan-worthy "A priest walks into a bar" jokes as transitions between scenes, and many of the monologues were great. And I swear to you, if you see the show, you'll never look at a banana the same way again. But some of the ensemble pieces aimed for funny and came short, and one or two monologues just fell flat. But with only ten rehearsals and no time to workshop or develop the scenes of this process-based play, it's easy to forgive the weaker scenes in the context of the plentiful laughs. And hey, it really is set in a bar, so whatever could be bad about that?

Ballad Boys
When any play is advertised as being 100 minutes long, it should not exceed 100 minutes in length. This is especially true during PLAF, when people may have scheduled one performance after the other, and are counting on things not to run late so that they can get from one venue to the next. And if a show will, in fact, go more than five minutes over its advertised runtime, somebody at the venue—probably the person making the front-of-house announcement about turning off cell phones, etc.—should tell the audience about the adjusted length of the performance. What should not happen, ever, is a 100-minute play running, inexplicably, 135 minutes in length. That is not the only reason I left Ballad Boys angry, but it just might be the biggest, because those extra thirty-five minutes transported the play from "I've seen worse" to "my god, that was awful." In many ways, Ballad Boys is similar to Hung on a Blonde Ponytail, which BCKSEET developed and produced two seasons ago and re-mounted at last year's Fringe: a cast featuring two men and a woman, an offstage band, and a plot dealing with how music can destroy even the closest relationships. But where Ponytail soared, Ballad Boys failed, and failed hard. The fault wasn't the cast's, but rather the script's. A note to new theatre companies (Ballad Boys is Aspire Arts' first production): your first production probably shouldn't be the untested, unworkshopped writing of a first-time playwright. While the story was at times engaging, Alex Bechtel's script was really weak and went on entirely too long. The songs strayed and lasted too long, and the music-free scenes were overwritten to a fault. Those aforementioned 135 minutes could easily have been cut down to a much more tolerable sixty-five by cutting out a lot of the needless dialogue—including much of the second act. Less is more, and an action or a look can speak volumes more than scripted dialogue sometimes. But unfortunately, the (probably quite talented) actors didn't even have an opportunity to act, only to recite. What a waste of an evening—and a waste that was far longer than it should have been.