Coming events

It's a busy November. If you're not too exhausted from last week's Mirliton Festival or the NOLA Bookfair or the upcoming Festival of the Overstuffed Oak Street this weekend, rest assured there's more coming.

Next week, the NOLA Fringe Alternative Theater Festival The Fringe website explains the idea here.

Fringe theater is a tradition that started in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947 when eight performing groups were excluded from the mainstream annual arts festival. They decided to perform anyway, finding inexpensive or free venues on the fringes of the city. The Edinburgh Fringe Festival has since grown into one of the largest arts festivals in the world, eclipsing the original festival that was too afraid for fringe.

Great ideas spread. Fringe Festivals have been launched in cities throughout the US, the most well-known being the festivals in Minneapolis and New York. New Orleans has always been a city that embraces artists, where creativity has flourished and the avant-garde has gravitated. These are the roots of the New Orleans Fringe Festival – the festival of the wild, weird, fresh, and original.

The Festival provides the venue and the audience; the performers do the rest. Anything can be performed: we let the audiences decide what is excellent, astonishing or brilliantly insane.

Interestingly enough, the NOLA Fringe Fest has grown so large that it has become necessary to exclude some of its participating performances from the main venues due to time limitations. And so you get a number of shows designated as "Bring Your Own Venue" events which I suppose we could call the Fringe of the Fringe.

One such Fringe² show called To Moscow, You Betcha! will be at John Paul's (940 Elysian Fields Ave.) for two performances on November 17 and a third on November 21. The play is a mash-up of scenes from Chekhov's Three Sisters with actual quotes from Sarah Palin's various media encounters, and internet postings in such a way that inserts her into the play as a character. Menckles, who appears in the cast as Masha, says the effect is something like watching a Bugs Bunny cartoon with Palin as Bugs wisecracking over a melodramatic background. Check it out if you can.

Also we're hearing there will be two one more Testaverde shows the week of Thanksgiving. One on November 22 at One Eyed Jack's with Dax Riggs, and another at the Circle Bar on November 27. Perhaps the new record will be available at one of these this shows.

Update: Sorry about the Facebook link to the play's info. It requires a Facebook login. Facebook is pretty stupid generally.

Upperdate: As corrected in the text, there is only one Testaverde show scheduled now.