Minnesota Fringe Festival 2025: "Fangs and Bangs (and Sangs)"

Day: 7

Show: 24

Title: Fangs and Bangs (and Sangs)

Category: Comedy / Musical Theater / Storytelling / LGBTQIA+ Content

By: Special When Lit

Written by: Nissa Nordland

Location: Southern Theater

Summary: #TCTheater fave Nissa Nordland enlists some of her talented friends (different every night) to read some of the "sexy vampire tales" that she wrote as a teenager.

Highlights: Nissa has written a lot of shows for Fringe and the TC Horror Festival, and this is like her origin story. Turns out she has always been interested in writing sexy, scary stories, and she has her journals and a floppy disc full of stories to prove it! She's an endearing host as she explains the concept of the show and then gets vulnerable, reading her journal entries full of her innermost teenage thoughts. A slide show of yearbook photos, journal entries, and sketches support her storytelling. She sings a couple of late '90s / early aughts songs accompanied by musicians (Nicholas Nelson and Keith Hovis at the show I attended), but the highlight really is the reading of a vampire story about a redheaded teenaged vampire named Lennox and her romance with a vampire hunter named Noah. The story is continuous throughout the five shows, so you'll need to go back if you want to find out how things turn out. Reading the story on the night I attended were Amber Bjork, Derek Lee Miller, Brettina Davis, and Duck Washington, who came prepared for the steamy scenes. And the section of the story that I saw got pretty steamy! It's very funny watching these actors read Nissa's teenage dreams, but it's even more fun to watch her react with a combination of sheer delight and utter horror.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here. 

"Three Sisters / No Sisters" by Theatre Pro Rata at the Crane Theater

I love seeing plays in rep, with a company of actors performing multiple plays in rotation over a period of time. It's especially satisfying when the plays are related (e.g., the Guthrie's epic History Plays last year). But Theatre Pro Rata is taking repertory theater one step further into something called simultaneous theater. Not only are they doing two shows in rep, they're being performed simultaneously! With the same cast! In the same building! On the stage of the Crane Theater, the funny and tragic and very human world of Chekhov's Three Sisters is playing out, while at the same time in the lobby of the theater, Aaron Posner's No Sisters is unfurling with the characters who are not on stage. After seeing the first one I reported that Theatre Pro Rata's Three Sisters as a stand-alone piece is an excellent production of a classic play that feels modern and relevant and relatable. A few days later I saw No Sisters and found it to be a delightful companion piece - similar in theme but very absurd and meta, giving us more insight into the minor characters. Note that the audience space in the lobby is limited, so if you want to see both plays you should get those tickets now (and yes you do have to go back on another day to see it), but if you can only see one, Three Sisters is an entirely satisfying experience on its own (although it may leave you wondering about the string of expletives coming from the lobby).

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2023: "Primary"

Day: 9

Show: 34

Title: Primary

Category: COMEDY / DRAMA / LGBTQIA+ CONTENT / POLITICAL CONTENT

By: Alex Church

Created by: Alex Church

Location: Augsburg Studio

Summary: A longtime Congresswoman loses her primary election and her family all in one day.

Highlights: This show is donating part of their profits to Women Winning, an organization dedicated to helping pro-choice women get elected to positions at all levels, but the story itself does not make a convincing case for anyone to run for elected office. Elizabeth Young has sacrificed everything for her political career, and has the accomplishments to show for it. But when her adopted daughter Anna comes out as gay during the campaign, and she's dating a political reporter, it brings all of the issues bubbling just under the surface out into the open. Elizabeth's marriage is in trouble, and her daughter wants nothing to do with her. Adding fuel to the fire, Elizabeth's seemingly racist but actually supportive mother left the crumbling house Elizabeth's father built to Anna, and the two disagree about what to do with it. The political gets very personal in this drama, coming to an explosive conclusion. The show is well acted (including an unforeseen appearance by the playwright as Elizabeth, which, not having read the program closely, took me a minute to realize), with a recorded video of a clever spoof of a political ad opening the show, and gets into some real thorny awkward discussions between various characters (Anna is having some relationship issues too). Like I said, not the best ad for running for office, but good theater.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.