Jill's PLAF Diary for Friday, September 4 – Monday, September 7

Missed Connections, A Craigslist Fantasia
I love craigslist. I found my job on craigslist. I never found love on craigslist, but I'll admit to trying. And it's the trying that serves as the foundation for Missed Connections. I wanted to love it. I was excited to go. And the play might have succeeded if it had stuck to the world of everybody's favorite virtual bulletin board, creating a script from found text and elevating the good while making fun of the bad. But instead, it took a turn toward the absurd (in the literal, rather than the Beckett, way) with imagined scenarios so off the wall that any intended humor took a backseat to poor concept. And could somebody please tell me what was up with the dancing?
Festival rating: Good concept; poor execution.

Store
I loved Car and I loved House, so perhaps my expectations were too high for Store, because I was disappointed. Sure, the design was amazing and the choreography was generally strong, but I don't think I got it. And I really really wanted to.

Store lacked the emotional resonance of House and the surprise of Car and left me feeling empty for want of either—or both—of those things. I can't say I hated it, but I can't say I liked it, either. I think it's one of those shows that you either understand from the get-go or you don't. I did not—but I hope that whatever's next for Kate Watson-Wallace will be a return to what I'd so loved and admired in the past.
Festival rating: Excellent design; very good movement; fair to middling on the whole package.

A Singer's Circus
Finally, a performance that left me satisfied!

This show isn't for everyone. If you don't know or can't stand Judy Garland or Edith Piaf, or if you're not into solo performance, it's definitely not for you. But these are all things that I can get behind, and so I was treated to about 100 minutes of dynamic, almost reverent, cabaret. Jen Fellman, like the two women who she so admires, is a little lady with a big voice and while she doesn't sound much like her idols (either when she sings their songs or interprets their speaking voices), she pours every ounce of her small frame into the performance. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't weepy by the second verse of "La Vie En Rose." That lady who walked out for some unknown reason two songs in was really missing out.
Festival rating: Completely enjoyable, especially if you're down with Dorothy.

Kill Me Now
I think that maybe, if I stop approaching Fringe with such high expectations, I won't be nearly as let down.

There was plenty to love about KMN: a familiar format, great staging, lovably ridiculous characters. And for a while, I was loving it. I mean, who wouldn't love an interpretive dance about the history of Native Americans, complete with cameos by Pocahontas, Rita Moreno in West Side Story, and venereal disease? Unfortunately, the last ten minutes of the show took it from amusingly implausible to completely absurd (and this time I do mean in the Beckett way), much like last year's awesome-till-the-end The European Lesson. There were better ways to execute the finale, which related to the show's title, and perhaps with a show that's different for every performance, I just saw a bad ending. But I think that no matter the outcome of the "competition," the conclusion remains the same, taking what could have been an enjoyable show and making it, ultimately, unsatisfying.

Inside Julia Child
Inside Julia Child has proven to be the most surprising show I've seen during this year's festival, made more surprising because of my initial dismay at seeing that the titular and only character in the show would be played by a man. (So overdone. We all get it. Julia Child was tall and not especially feminine.) My doubt about the quality of the show strengthened momentarily when I saw that said man, John Jarboe, wasn't even trying all that hard to look like Julia.

But what Jarboe did instead was imitate her presence in the kitchen almost perfectly. On either side of the "stage," really the back of the Philly Kitchen Share, small televisions played clips of Julia Child's television program, on mute, while Jarboe moved around the kitchen, cutting butter at the same time as Child, spilling a container of kitchen utensils at the same time as Child, and having the same baking problems as Child—all without a monitor of his own to look at. His movements were off from the recording's, but barely: just enough, really, to allow us to glance at the screen and over to him, more an echo of the source material than a theatrical flub.

I wasn't sure how much of Jarboe's script came from the video itself and how much was written or ad-libbed (certainly, a monologue delivered while we waited for our tarte tatin to bake sufficiently didn't appear on Child's show), but ultimately, I didn't care. I was mesmerized. It was over in half an hour—and then there was dessert.
Festival rating: I just hope it comes back next year. Or sooner.