Orlando Fringe’s Winter Mini-Fest is celebrating its 10th anniversary with a return to its original name (after briefly becoming FestN4) and location at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center. Here are reviews of 15 shows running now through Sunday, Jan. 11; visit orlandofringe.org/winterminifest for more information.
1 Small Lie: Martin Dockery
Sit back and relax, because master monologian Martin Dockery is back with another narrative journey that defies easy categorization in any genre and is essential Fringe viewing. As dramatically compelling as any true crime podcast and twice as funny, 1 Small Lie isn’t only an enthralling tall tale; it’s also a one-man technical tour de force. Surrounded by a stage full of softly glowing lamps, Dockery changes their colors with a swipe of his phone while simultaneously synchronizing his speech to match up perfectly with his constantly evolving soundtrack of pop songs and Badalamenti-esque atmospheric instrumentals. (Reviewed May 2025)
1 Small Lie: Martin Dockery tickets and information
Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones, & The Skin You’re In
Intimate audience participation improv intersects with an educational inquiry into endoskeletons’ advantages in Amica Hunter’s trippy, touching TED Talk about using performance art as an escape from physical pain. Anatomica is sometimes cute, sometimes cringey, and always extremely Fringey. (Reviewed in May 2023)
Anatomica: A Comedy About Meat, Bones, & The Skin You’re In tickets and information
The Best Man Show
Mark Vigeant’s dramatic drunken demonstration of what not to do at a wedding gets a ton of mileage out of the material before detouring into a delirious interpretive dance number. Vigeant may be the biggest disaster to hit wedding receptions since the Electric Slide, and I raise my flute of cheap champagne to him for sustaining the insanity as long as he manages. (Reviewed May 2025)
The Best Man Show tickets and information
Clymove X Rambüs
Longtime Fringegoers who fondly remember choreographer Mary Clymene from her days with Voci Dance will welcome her return to Central Florida’s stages after over a decade away, now accompanied by her own very own women-driven dance company and fellow Voci veteran Nigel John.
The first 20-odd-minute segment, 2024’s “Hips,” begins with a flesh-colored pile of tangled bodies and ASMR-style animal noises evoking the African savanna. Gracefully feline floor work, sensual and athletic, builds into breathtaking feats of balancing that elevate ordinary weight-sharing to acrobatic heights. Distorted dialogue delivers a paean to liberated femininity (“Feral fertile and fanged; she was never just the songbird, she was the vulture”) while lighting designer Conor Mulligan silhouettes the dancers’ diverse bodies into dramatic living sculptures.
After an informational intermission, during which Clymene informally answers audience questions while her performers change into eclectic patchwork dresses, the program concluded with 2025’s “Martha Always Said.” This slyly insightful peek behind the scenes of a dance company is inspired by the cattiness and comradery that complicates relationships between strong women, and features Josephine Brunnner — who looks and moves remarkably like Clymene did 20 years ago — trying to fit in among her competitive colleagues (JoVonna Parks, Khaila Espinoza, Samara Taylor, Arianna Stendardo).
Tying this all together is a thrilling musical soundtrack by Kurt Rambus, aka Orlando’s DJ Nigel John, who has now collaborated with Clymove on nine projects. Much more than a mere mixtape, Rambus blends ’70s funk and acid jazz with lo-fi beats and Afro-futurist drones into a darkly cinematic soundscape.
While many dance concerts are composed of brief pieces no longer than a pop song, it’s especially refreshing to see more substantial works with enough running time to develop and breathe. Like the acclaimed Alvin Ailey and Elisa Monte troupes that Clymene trained with, her Clymove is grounded in the roots of classic modern dance, and offers Orlando audiences a mouthwatering taste of Manhattan-quality movement.
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Cracks
You may meet more than 80,000 people in your lifetime, but pay especially close attention when Claire Lochmueller says hello at the start of her blackly comedic autobiographical monologue, because what would be a simple introduction for anyone else is for her a declaration of identity decades in the making. Claire lived her first 30 years as a screaming voice trapped inside a cis-masculine shell named Matt. Catholic school confessions to bluenosed Benedictines and endless marching at military school did nothing to dispel Lochmueller’s gender dysphoria, a diagnosis that she struggled to accept despite experiencing debilitating depressive disassociation, which drove her into alcoholism.
Lochmueller’s Cracks crams humor within the horror stories — like her confession of teenage stolen valor, or the paranoid lengths she went to to purchase woman’s clothing — but her pain always lingers beneath the laughs, and her vivid evocation of a panic attack triggered one of the most visceral moments of empathy I’ve experienced at Fringe. The script’s timeline periodically becomes tangled in tangents, and I wish director David Resnick had slowed down some of the most intense moments in order to allow the emotions to land. However, Lochmueller’s contagious climactic euphoria upon embracing her true self after a lifetime of self-destructive denial makes this essential viewing, especially in an age when trans Americans are under assault.
Cracks tickets and information
The Event
The Event involves a man (David Calvitto, in a bravura marathon performance) standing alone onstage in front of an audience of mostly strangers, narrating his action — or utter lack thereof — in the third person for the better part of an hour. With the fleeting exception of a stagehand, whom he alternately extols and upbraids, nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful, and this drolly self-depreciating actor will be the first one to admit it, openly encouraging his audience to leave or at least fall asleep during his hypnotically professorial external monologue.
To say much too more about writer-director John Clancy’s witty satire on the theater and modern society might shatter the surreal spell that this hilariously heartbreaking show casts. It starts out like a one-man version of Waiting for Godot (minus the slapstick), then shifts into a Douglas Adams-esque sociological spoof (minus the sci-fi), before ending with a passionate plea regarding our primal need for personal communion, and a chilling rant on the collapse of collective memory.
The poetic script’s final fadeout doesn’t quite feel fully satisfying, and I’m still uncertain if a mid-show kerfuffle during the press preview was intentional or not — which may just be a testament to its ultra-meta nature. If you’re willing to take a chance on “some sort of art thing” and enjoy watching a fourth wall being not merely broken but butchered, this is one event worth RSVP’ing to.
The Event tickets and information
The Fabulous King James Bible
The Fabulous King James Bible makes incisive, insightful theological statements about the role of religion in controlling the population, saying the quiet part out loud about the corruption at the heart of the Church and State, but this Tudor tutoring is terrifically funny even if you aren’t a biblical history buff. Not to be missed for all the spilled tea in England. (Reviewed May 2025)
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Funny Fortunes With Mercado de la Fortuna
Cuban-American comic Diane Jorge, who scored a huge hit with her improvised telenovelas at last May’s Orlando Fringe, returns with a takeoff of another beloved Spanish-language television tradition: Puerto Rican fortune teller Walter Mercado, the Latino Liberace of horoscopes. Jorge brings him back to life — bouffant hairpiece, red cape, and all — as Mercado de la Fortuna, a (legally distinct) loving spoof of the late psychic.
During an introductory autobiographical monologue, Jorge demonstrates the volcanic verbosity that made it hard for her to fit in with other children — except on Halloween — as pianist Ralph Krumins provides accompaniment on keyboards. The core of the show starts when she selects an audience member to sit at her table festooned with battery-powered tea lights and a crystal ball, where she divines their financial or romantic future with the aid of oversized Hispanic-themed tarot cards.
Jorge is like a real-life SNL sketch character, whether in or out of her Mercado guise, and although the accuracy of her predictions isn’t guaranteed, invasive questions leading to big belly laughs are. Even a master of “Si, y” improv would struggle to fill an hour with a handful of participants, so the press preview of Funny Fortunes didn’t reach the delirious heights of her last show, but Diane Jorge remains a must-see for Fringe’s fans of funny females.
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The Goodlucks
Juanita Tyson (Tanya Neely) may be the biggest Black box office draw in Hollywood, but the prospect of her winning a prestigious Broadway acting award has her twisted in knots that even her publicist niece Lynn (Maa Bruce-Amanquah) can’t untangle. Making matters worse, her co-star and spouse, Bert Goodluck (McDaniel Austin), is an unlikeable man-baby whose envy of her success is even more embarrassing than his hairpiece. If August Wilson had created a wacky three-camera sitcom pilot — complete with a saucy daughter (Alma Ramirez) and goofy best friend (Jataun Gilbert) — it might have looked a lot like The Goodlucks.
Writer-director Ma’at Atkins received acclaim at the Hollywood Fringe for this family dramedy, which pays tribute to pioneering performers like Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee and Hattie McDaniel, while acknowledging the considerable barriers that African American artists continue to face. However, I fear something might have been lost in transit to Orlando, because I found the play’s central question “will famous rich folks get even richer?” dramatically uncompelling.
Neely gives her overwrought actress character an appropriate flair for florid gestures, while still finding moments of quiet intensity in which to lower her facade; but among the rest of the cast, only the easy-going Gilbert manages to make his dense dialogue sound like something that would come out of a human being’s mouth. Technical elements are distractingly DIY, cue pickup is inconsistent, and the staging is stiffly two-dimensional, with front-facing actors often barely making side-eye contact.
The Goodlucks offers some important observations about race and misogyny in the entertainment industry, and features a fierce female lead, but its shallow supporting characters and too-convenient conclusion ultimately undermine its admirable intent.
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Jon Bennett: This Will Only Ever Happen Once
Fringe Festival favorite Jon Bennett — the Australian Outback’s most entertaining export since Steve Irwin got stingrayed — is back in Orlando with a brand-new comic monologue tracing the connection between his two lifelong obsessions: performing on stage and spotting animals in nature. This Will Only Ever Happen Once is an autobiographical shaggy-dog story that rambles breathlessly through traumatic talent shows, Borneo jungle safaris and David Attenborough dance parties. A sensitive child bullied by his siblings, Bennett relates a hysterical menagerie of memorable mammal-related mishaps — including encounters with humpback whales, wild orangutans and a bloated cow corpse — that might be too absurd to believe, if they weren’t accompanied by his fast-paced slideshow of family photos and childhood drawings proving their provenance.
Bennett performed this version of his latest script, which was split nearly in half from an earlier draft, for the first time at a press preview mere hours after stepping off a red-eye flight. So it’s understandable if the show’s dramatic shape — which includes an abrupt ending, followed by an offhand yet essential epilogue — could still stand some development. But for a comedian best known for pretending things are a cock, Bennett’s latest verbal adventure is not merely as charmingly chaotic as a cat video; his animal-inspired epiphanies about the ineffable pleasure of irreproducible experiences prove unexpectedly moving.
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Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval
Based on the 1986 computer game by Rob Swigart (not the better known Valve game featuring GladOS), Portal is an ambitious intellectual sci-fi drama set a century from now, when civilization has been driven underground by the ravages of neurophagic wars. Mathematical genius Petra Devore (Katherine Stevens), and her pasta-obsessed sibling, Larin (Rhys Rose, providing welcome comic relief), race against time to transition humanity into a higher state of being, while mustache-twirling meanies (Chuck Dent and Jac LeDoux) try to maintain the fascist status quo.
In whittling down an entire streaming series’ worth of world-building into one fast-moving hour, writer-director David Strauss has crafted a metaphor-laden script that combines the abstract cosmology of 2001’s Space Child finale with the head-scratching technobabble of TNG-era Star Trek. Even if you arrive early for the preshow slideshow of expository info-dumping, the dialogue’s dense deluge of unfamiliar acronyms may leave you feeling lost in space. The narrative logic — where a lone protagonist can save the world by solving puzzles — is straight out of a vintage 8-bit text adventure, and the self-serious high-stakes tone tends towards ’70s British TV shows like The Tomorrow People.
However, this all-star cast of PRT stalwarts — especially the magnetically self-assured Stevens, and McKenzie Pollock as her manic pixie cryosleep dream-girl — exhibits enough emotional investment for me to accept (if not entirely understand) the perplexing plot twists. Memorable minor roles include Rob Del Medico as a wounded veteran with a Dory-sized attention span and Nikki Darden as an Antarctic anarchist with an inexplicable mid-Atlantic accent. For thoughtful fans of hardcore philosophical science fiction who are willing to suspend their disbelief into the exosphere, this Portal takes the cake.
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Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep
Fringegoers who adored writer-performer Joanna Rannelli’s Critics’ Choice award-winning hairstyling comedy Bangs, Bobs & Banter should secure their ’dos before seeing Private Parts: The Secrets We Keep, because although this often-funny one-woman showcase has the propulsive energy of a stand-up set, Rannelli’s autobiographical expose is so searingly raw it deserves a trigger warning. She starts out on a light note, dancing to “Eye of the Tiger” in a wedding veil as she confesses to a secret marriage — followed by a secret divorce — to an international acrobat. Hold on tight, because her roller coaster of emotion-packed storytelling only accelerates from there, as she traces how her alcoholic mother’s legacy of shameful secrets turned her into a bed-soiling 7-year-old with a cigarette habit.
Director Kerry Ipema expertly shapes the pace of this potentially punishing piece, wisely modulating the volume and employing efficient lighting shifts to break up the barrage of bad memories. But it’s Rannelli’s own willingness to dig into her hidden past and expose her most private persona that makes this must-see monologue such a powerfully moving experience.
I could quibble that the uplifting ending, which comes hot on the heels of devastating revelations involving abuse and infertility, seems somewhat glib. But if someone like Rannelli, who spends life “torn between things I want to know and the fear of finding out” can bravely share her darkest truths, it gives hope that those of us who have endured far less can also find forgiveness for ourselves and others.
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The Rooms We Carry
Central Florida theatergoers are accustomed to consuming dance performances that are either entirely abstract or serve to spell out a straightforward plot, and almost always have all their rough edges smoothed off. But if there is an audience hungry for an impressionistic journey through experimental improvisation, they can find much-needed nourishment in The Rooms We Carry, an emotionally charged contemporary movement exercise from Quantum Leap Productions.
Michelina Moen and Cristina Ramos — the show’s primary performers and co-directors — are both compelling dancers who can transform simple pedestrian movements into impactful gestures. Moen, a longtime favorite from VarieTease, manages to beautifully balance both muscularity and vulnerability; Ramos is simultaneously sinuous and sinewy, especially during a vibrant salsa number. Amid symbolic props like photographs, phonographs and vintage furniture, the pair take turns improvising angst-imbued solos that evoke powerful feelings of regret, release and renewal, without relying on a literal storyline.
Moen and Ramos are accompanied onstage by technical designer Kylee Taylor, who employs handheld projectors, flashlights and color-changing LED bulbs to conjure some striking stage images. Unfortunately, Taylor’s innovative illumination techniques too often obscure the artists while blinding the audience, and her presence sometimes pulls focus from the dancers. Similarly, the soundtrack of pop songs — from Billie Eilish and Hayley Williams to David Bowie and Childish Gambino — is smartly curated (save for a saccharine Phil Collins finale), but is undercut by several jarring audio edits.
The Rooms We Carry is a show that demands patience from its viewers, presenting more of a loose collection of intriguing concepts than a fully fleshed-out creation. I can’t help wishing that more of the running time was devoted to ensemble moments integrating these skilled performers, and a little less to deep breathing and shuffling setpieces. However, I’m optimistic that this talented trio can polish this project into a more consistent package before embarking on their upcoming tour of Canadian fringe festivals without rubbing away all its fascinating personal facets.
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Softie
Wearing wire-frame glasses and a knitted cap on his balding head, writer-performer Tim Felton isn’t exactly bringing sexy back, but this milquetoast Midwestern househusband might just be bringing “mildly attractive middle-age” back with his inexplicable solo comedy, Softie. Tim loooooves getting to know new people, and is prone to schmoozing shamelessly with anyone and everyone, from audience members to his own booth technician. With romantic guitar strumming underscoring every attempted meet-cute, he individually welcomes every attendee while using the word “magic” more often than Vin Diesel says “family.”
Felton compares his quirky persona to Mr. Rogers, Pee-wee Herman and Buster Bluth, but his malapropistic wordplay and narcissistic naiveté remind me more of Arrested Development’s Tobias Funke. His slow-burn warmup features fantastically fearless crowd work, as the irritatingly ingratiating character gradually charms us with his innocent urge to make connections. And by the time Felton’s show culminates in an audience-participation Spin the Bottle party (in which I was gratefully unable to participate) he’s made a strong case that more platonic physical contact among adults might result in a healthier society.
However, about 20 minutes into this oddly endearing encounter group, there’s a violent vibe shift as Felton snaps into salacious stand-up mode, shattering the previously established mood with aggressively profane pubescent rants about emo music, intercourse with his “cool Christian” spouse and his deficit of spontaneous erections. If Felton could just take out the unnecessary 10 minutes of F-bombs and penis-shaped balloons — without altering the weirdly charming Napoleon Dynamite-meets-Emo Philips elements of his creation — then this surreally silly yet somehow moving show would move up from a soft suggestion to a hard recommendation.
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Vampira: A Hollywood Horror Story
Few of them know it, but every black-glad goth hanging around a Hot Topic owes a debt to Maila Nurmi — aka Vampira — the pioneering television horror hostess who became a cautionary tale during the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. She finally gets her due in writer-performer Ingrid Garner’s ghoulishly good one-woman show, in which she fully inhabits the wasp-waisted Plan 9 From Outer Space star’s iconic persona (which was shamelessly appropriated years later by Elvira).
The child of a temperance preacher and an alcoholic, Nurmi “never caught the gist of being human.” Fleeing her unhappy home for Hollywood, she was befriended by Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and James Dean (among other up-and-coming A-listers) before becoming a short-lived sensation in her own right. Garner isn’t merely a name-dropper, because Nurmi made a measurable impact on these legendary men’s lives, even though she’s largely been overlooked.
Despite that erasure, the subversive impact of Vampira’s mesmerizingly morbid sensuality on repressed Eisenhower-era Americans continues to echo today in punk music and fashion. Garner’s gossip-packed, tightly paced theatrical tribute to Nurmi is informative and entertaining, but also deeply emotional at points; I only wish a shocking 11th-hour twist was revealed earlier to address its implications. Vampira’s reputation is long overdue for a resurrection, and Garner’s inspirational interpretation of this iconoclast against mid-century domesticity will make you want to go out and “terrorize normalcy” yourself.
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