Scene Report: Day 1 (Thursday)

I will do my best to post report on shows I see throughout the festival, and I invite you to do the same. If you want to file regular reports like these yourself, email ronehmke@hotmail.com and I will send you an invite from Blogger so you can do so anytime you like. You can also just email me your reports and I'll post them for you as soon as I am able.

I've been so busy with the show I am part of that I haven't seen too much other stuff yet, and I probably won't get a chance to do any heavy-duty festival going until we wrap up ours on Sunday afternoon. However, I did check out one of the plays sharing the space at Squeaky Wheel with us: Morphine Hearts' production of Matt LaChiusa's Fred's Requiem, which runs off and on through August 4. (FYI and BTW, another show running at Squeaky now is Scott Kurchak's My Life as an Ape, which got some blog comments by several people last year.)

Requiem is an ambitious play for the festival and the space: about an hour and a half long, with a cast of eleven. It unfolds as a series of two- and three-character vignettes (many of which could probably stand on their own as self-contained mini-dramas), capped with one piece featuring most of the cast onstage at the same time. As always, my blurry cell phone photos don't do it justice, but here's a quick glimpse:





For a play that centers around a funeral, there's a lot of humor here (though I wouldn't exactly call the show a comedy, per se), and it's fun figuring out the various interconnections between the characters, who span three generations of working-class Buffalo.

Tried to make it to La Tee Da for the 10-11 pm Happy Hour, but it was not to be, so instead I stopped by Soundlab for the Kick Off Party. I was mainly there between acts, and most of the decent-sized crowd was outside, which gave me a chance to catch up with 2 of the acts who drove down from Montreal: Car Stories (which has a different cast and storyline this year) and The Pamplemousse Explosion. Jason from Car Stories (he's one of the founders of the Infringement movement) tells me that Buffalo's may well be the largest festival on the circuit this year.

Back inside, I caught a snippet of Axis of Evil, whose elaborate setup apparently involved four carloads of equipment,including a bicycle wired for sound:



Had a long day ahead of me the next day (which involved no festival-going beyond the Dream Cabaret), so I headed home. But the hoppin' scene outside Soundlab--punctuated by spontaneous percussion and singing by performers and audience members--was a sign that festival season is back, and not a moment too soon.


Amount spent on admissions for the evening (2 shows total): $5