Friday, August 2, 2019

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2019: "The Shrieking Harpies"

Day: 1

Show: 1

Category: COMEDY / IMPROV / MUSICAL THEATER

By: Shrieking Harpies

Created by: The Shrieking Harpies

Location: Strike Theater

Summary: "Shrieking Harpies is a fierce femme powered musical improv trio dedicated to bringing bad-assery to the improv stage."

Highlights: The Shrieking Harpies perform regularly at Huge Theater, usually past my bedtime, so I was happy to finally see a full set from them. It's great fun, very feminist (in the mostly male-dominated world of improv), and a perfect way to start my 2019 Fringe. Based solely on the audience suggestion "astronaut," performers Lizzie Gardner, Taj Ruler, and Hannah Wydeven created an entire story with multiple characters and a beginning, middle, and end, that even mostly made sense! The show you see will be different than what I saw, but I loved this tale of female astronauts (and their moms) finally getting to be heroes in space. Because women were born for space! It's pretty remarkable to watch them create the story live in front of you, and with songs too! They improvise funny, clever, silly, melodic songs (with harmonies), along with Justin Nellis improvising on the keyboard (and playing not just for the songs, but providing an improvised soundtrack for the entire story). If you like improv, and musical theater, and women telling women's stories - don't miss this one!

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.