Minnesota Fringe Festival 2025: "This"

Day: 8

Show: 26

Title: This

Category: Comedy / Solo Show / Storytelling

By: Tim Uren

Created by: Tim Uren

Location: Theatre in the Round

Summary: A solo storytelling show about life in the theater and comedy world.

Highlights: I found this show to be surprisingly lovely. It's fun to get insight into the world of an artist (it's not as glamorous as it appears), but even if you're not an artist, the show is full of relevant material about life: anxiety, addiction, relationships, careers, memories vs. experiences, existential dread. Tim has constructed the show as a series of chapters, walking us more or less chronologically through his life, in a very personable and engaging way. From his hit comedy show Look Ma No Pants in the shadow of the Scrimshaw brothers, to being fired from his dream job at Brave New Workshop, to designing board games (which, honestly, I didn't really get, not being a game person of the video or board variety). It's really about his love of theater, and our love of theater, and being present together in the same room in the very special way that theater requires. The title comes from the first word Tim spoke as a child, when he didn't know what he wanted, just "this" or "this" or "this." But he comes around to discovering that this, here, now, is the only thing we have. Tim's final show is this Sunday, and you can also see him with his theater company Ghoulish Delights or as a part of The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society which performs regularly at Crooners, information about both can be found here.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here. 

A Crooners Holiday: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society and Kate and Bradley Beahen

With the brief lull in #TCTheater that comes around the holidays*, I was able to head down the road to Crooners Supper Club in Fridley for a couple of shows. Crooners was a lifesaver for me in 2020, as it was pretty much the only place you could see live performance, in their makeshift parking lot drive-in theater. Now with four different performance spaces (all with food and drink service), there's always something happening at Crooners, much of it theater adjacent. A few days after Christmas I attended The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society's Christmas Post Mortem show, and a few days before New Year's I attended siblings Kate and Bradley Beahen's cabaret show Fresh Starts and Showstoppers. Read on for a brief summary of those shows, both of which will be returning in 2025. And if you don't already have your tickets for next Monday's A Grand UNITE for Civil Rights, a fundraiser for the ACLU hosted by #TCTheater artist Serena Brook and featuring a veritable who's who of local music-theater talent, you better get them right now before they're gone! What's better than a night of good food, great entertainment, and a worthy cause?

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2019: "Frankenstein: Two Centuries"

Day: 9

Show: 26

Title: Frankenstein: Two Centuries

Category: HORROR / MYSTERY / SCI-FI / SPOKEN WORD

By: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society

Created by: Shanan Custer, Joshua English Scrimshaw, Tim Uren, Eric Webster, and Joe Weismann

Location: Rarig Center Thrust

Summary: Two original radio plays done in the style of two real life radio series, Escape and Sanctum Mysteries.

Highlights: This group has perfected the old timey radio show performance, complete with classic microphones, sound effects, and smooth radio voices. Often they recreate actual historical radio scripts, but here they've written originals, and both are a delight. The first one is creepy cool, and continues after the ending of Mary Shelley's classic novel if Captain Robert Walton's sister Margaret went looking for the creature, whom she sees as wondrous, and instead finds the evil doctor himself reincarnated. The second one is, as the cast described in the informative intro (which they do for both plays), more silly and fun than scary. I honestly can't remember or make sense of the plot, but it involved lots of monsters and horrible/great puns, hosted by a darkly funny man along with the chipper but desperately unhappy Lipton Tea lady (as voiced by the Queen of the Minnesota Fringe, Shanan Custer). Check out their website to find out about future performances and to listen to their podcast.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.

Minnesota Fringe Festival 2018: "The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society"

Day: 6

Show: 21

Title: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society Versus the Nazis

Category: Drama / Mystery / Historical Content

By: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society

Created by: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society

Location: Rarig Center Thrust

Summary: A live reenactment of two radio plays from the '40s and '50s, both involving the good guys defeating the Nazis.

Highlights: If you saw the show last year, it's much of the same, and that's a good thing. This show is best enjoyed with eyes closed so that you can simulate the experience of listening to it gathered around the radio on a day long past. Except that it's hard not to open your eyes and see how the four-person cast is making all those sound effects, standing in front of old timey microphones with odds and ends around them. They're also able to create what sounds like way more than four voices as the play all the characters, good guys and bad. For these stories are from an era when good guys and bad guys were easy to distinguish. Two thirty-minute actual historical radio dramas are read in their entirety, preceded by a bit of context, and it's fun to imagine a time when dramas like this were the only source of entertainment, before TV and video games and the internet. It's good old-fashioned spine-tingling fun!

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.

Fringe Festival 2017: "The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society"

Day: 10

Show: 40

Title: The Mysterious Old Radio Listening Society

Category: Something Different

By: Goulish Delights

Created by: Joshua English Scrimshaw, Tim Uren, Eric Webster, Shanan Custer, and Joe Weismann

Location: U of M Rarig Center Thrust

Summary: A reenactment of two radio broadcasts from the '40s and '50s, complete with commercials and sound effects.

Highlights: Pairing a 1952 episode of Hall of Fantasy with a 1943 episode of The Shadow, this show is an entertaining and creepy homage to an era gone by, that of the radio drama. The creators of this show have a podcast of the same name (you can find it here, along with future live performances), and their love for and knowledge of the genre is evident. I closed my eyes a few times during the show, not just because I'm super sleep deprived after ten days of Fringing, but also because it's almost more chilling and thrilling to just listen and let your imagination create the picture of what's happening. And what's happening in these two programs is a lot of mysterious creatures and mad scientists and smart sleuths and the like. But it's also fun to watch the performers (see creator list above, plus Marc Doty filling in for Joe Weissman on keyboard when I saw the show), who all have such great retro radio voices (and smart retro wardrobe to match) with inventive sound effect implements. There's a reason these radio horror shows were so popular, and happily they continue to exist in some form today thanks to Goulish Delights.

Read all of my Fringe mini-reviews here.