FringeNext: Come See Our Show or the Teddy Bear Gets It

[FringeNext is the young performers, under 18, who may become the next generation of Fringe performers.]

Lyndsey Brown, Kevin Burgun & Christina Cardenas
Brebeuf Jesuit Prep (Indy)

These are excellent performers; the girls sing beautifully, together or separately, and they all act well. But the play ("winning" the Irish lottery---actually falling for an internet scam---and attempting to force payout of the "winnings" by threatening to guillotine the teddy bear taken from a child one of the girls is supposed to be babysitting, but has in fact left home alone) has, with apologies to Gertrude Stein, no "there" there.

The original songs were good. But the script was a meandering ramble. Even the core part of the "plot" didn't seem to exist: they did some background on the lottery "win", wandered off to high school life and getting in to college, and then shifted to "ok, time to shove the bear in the guillotine" so abruptly, and unexplainedly, that I was left wondering if they'd accidentally skipped a couple of pages of lines. Then having set that scene, pretty much went back to rambling from topic to topic with no dramatic tension until they reached the end of their time slot, with no denouement whatsoever---simply "okay, we're done now, thanks for coming."

There's a great deal of performance potential here, but it needs a script that goes somewhere and does something.

Piggie's Rating: **** for the performers and the musical portion; ** for the show itself