Rogue Report

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Fresno, California, on a Saturday morning after a Friday night spent at the 2007 version of the Rogue Performance Festival, and last night I went a lucky four-for-four on shows I attended. The Rogue is similar to the various Fringe Festivals around the world (all ultimately based on the original in Edinburgh), in that it is non-curated and non-juried, and offers acts that you won't necessarily see in so-called "professional" venues. Any and all manner of acts are welcome, from plays to spoken word to comedy to film, music and dance. As anyone who has attended a Fringe Festival (or a Rogue) will attest, the acts are sometimes hit or miss. Last night I hit on all four. Here's a brief round-up:

The first show I saw was the delightful Chart Toppers of 1349, presented at Dianna's South by Berkeley's Tim Ereneta. Tim took the premise of a biennial gathering of story-tellers in the year 1349 to present what he said were eight of the top ten requested tales from that time. Some might call them fairy tales, but as anyone who has read the Brothers Grimm and other archivists of those ancient stories knows, they were full of mayhem, magic and bloody deeds. Disneyfied it was most definitely not, but it certainly was fun. For some of the stories he told and more, check out his blog, here.

Next up was local performer Jaguar Bennett at the Ashtree as fictional CEO Larry Driscoll giving the PowerPoint presentation from Hell in Bullet Point. For anyone who has had to sit through interminable corporate presentations featuring pie-chart graphics and meaningless buzzwords, you know how low that bar is set, and yet Jag managed to limbo well beneath it. He had the audience laughing uproariously, and then abruptly plunged them off a cliff and into a bottomless pit of despair that made us all question our own existence. I will truly never watch a PowerPoint presentation the same way again.

After that, I headed up the road to the Starline Lounge for Barry Smith's Jesus in Montana. Subtitled Adventures in a Doomsday Cult, the show was a mixed-media monologue that was absolutely brilliant in its skewering of religion, cults, Southern culture, drug use, hitchhiking and, most especially, Barry himself. It was easy to see how this show won the Outstanding Solo Show Award at the 2005 New York International Fringe Festival.

Finally, I ended up at the Veni, Vidi, Vici -- rechristened the Suicide Lounge for the evening -- for a musical performance put on by Rogue founder Marcel Nunis and well-known local musicians Nate Butler on bass and Robert Paul on keyboard that was titled Love Songs Can Be a Pisser. The act featured a menu from which audience members were asked to choose a category, including Stalker (every audience's first choice), Newly Single and Pathetic, and Lookin' for a Hookup. The songs themselves then explored the darker side of love and loss, with a decided comic twist. For instance, in the Stalker category, Nate Butler sang an amazingly creepy version of Every Breath You Take. Some other songs included Lush Life, Since I Fell for You, Marcel's signature version of My Funny Valentine, and a hilarious take on Trust in Me, from the movie Jungle Book.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable evening, especially getting to visit with my pals Joel, Chris, Nate and Marcel. And this afternoon and evening, there are more shows, including San Francisco's Steven Karwoski in Are Ya Dating? and Marcel's play Tale End. I'll post more about those shows and put up some pictures tomorrow. For more on the Festival, check out these two sites, here and here.