FRINGE REVIEW: Electric Jungle

POSTED: Friday, September 7, 2012, 3:20 PM

Filed Under: Arts | On the Fringe Theater

Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!

SHOW: Electric Jungle

GROUP: Found Theater Company

GENRE: Theater

ATTENDED: Thu., Sept. 6, 9 p.m.

CLOSES: Mon., Sept. 24

BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: Set sail on a musical odyssey through the sound barrier and beyond! Delve into a cavernous landscape exploring the nature of sound through a maze of microphone vines and pulsing radio waves. Join our ensemble on another visceral adventure, fusing physical theater with text, imagery, and song.

WE THINK: If you were attempting to create the archetypal Fringe show, you'd want to include: some nonsensical soundscapes; fragments of acted scenes that, as soon as they coalesce, begin to dissolve; a cast of talented young performers (including one, inexplicably, in an alligator mask); and, if at all possible, a brief radio drama narrated with the use of a theremin. You'd be close to approximating the experience of Electric Jungle, from local collective Found Theater Company, founded in '09 by a group of Temple students. The opening vignette — a caveman in the foreground, elaborate shadow puppetry behind — sets the tone: a vague sense of being shipwrecked inside someone else's dream. A few folk-rock ballads, a children’s TV show gone direly wrong, the obligatory rhythm-section-on-a-bucket-and-some-old-pans and a few funny/awkward moments as characters struggle to find harmony round out exactly what that archetypal Fringe production ought to be: a good (but weird and slightly disorienting) time for all.

—Samantha Melamed

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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