Show: 18
Title: All Your Shimmering Gold
Category: Comedy / Drama / Horror / Musical Theater / Opera / Physical Theater / Literary adaptation / Political content
By: SUPERMOON
Created by: Michael Torsch
Location: Rarig Thrust
Summary: The defense contractor Northrop Grumman accidentally ends up in the middle of the Minnesota Fringe Festival with their presentation about their massive nuclear defense plans, so they perform Wagner's Das Rheingold to make it more theatrical for this audience.
Highlights: Friends, this one is weird, in the best and fringiest sense of the word. Michael Torsch makes the most unique entrance to a fringe show you will see this year, and then speaks to the audience as an executive from Northrup Grumman. He explains to us what our tax dollars are buying, a huge and extensive and terrifying plan for nuclear defense, describing what happens when one of these nuclear missiles go off, aided by a video playing on small screens above an arch. But since he knows we're a theater audience, he and his fellow employees put on a performance of Das Rheingold, about a greedy man who steals gold from the Rhine River, guarded by some river nymphs, and makes a ring to gain all of the power. Which leaves us to draw the parallels for ourselves. Michael and the cast (Mads Granlund, Caleb Byers, Simone Bernadette, and Genevieve Waterbury, one of whom actually sings) lip synch to the recorded opera, dressed in beautiful costumes, while the video of the opera plays on the screens. It's all just so bizarre and fascinating and not a little disturbing, and I'll be thinking about it for a while.
