Orlando Fringe 2023 festival wrap-up: Critics' Choice awards and recommendations for next year

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Photo by Seth Kubersky

The staff and board of the Orlando Fringe at the closing ceremonies of the 2023 Festival in Loch Haven Park.

Another Orlando Fringe has come and gone, as the 32nd annual theater festival drew to a close Monday, May 29, with the ceremonial presentation of the Critics’ Choice awards. Here is this year’s list of winners, which were again selected by myself and Matt Palm of the Orlando Sentinel, along with links to my reviews and some thoughts on shows I saw but lacked time to laud in print.

BEST TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
VarieTease: XX, The Imagination House
Spectacular lighting, sumptuous costumes and an expertly edited soundtrack helped make XX one of the most polished and cohesive shows in VarieTease’s history.

BEST FAMILY SHOW
Fruit Flies Like a Circus Peanut, The Fourth Wall (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST SITE-SPECIFIC SHOW
PeeVira's Scareavan Singalong: Love Vamp, DulceArt Works Inc.

BEST DANCE SHOW
Femmillennial, Kylie Thompson Dance
With sinuous weight sharing, innovative lifts, and seamless transitions, this emotionally potent movement piece about gender performance was the best Canadian modern dance show at Orlando Fringe in a decade.

BEST MAGIC SHOW
Absolute Magic, Keith Brown
Keith Brown’s illusions are always astounding, but his true magic power is his storytelling talent for activating audiences’ hardwired thirst for imagination.

BEST SPECIALTY SHOW
Easy as Pie (A James & Jamesy Comedy), Alastair Knowles
Easily my favorite James & Jamsey show ever, this Freudian fantastic voyage is simultaneously both a family-friendly Forbidden Zone full of eye-popping visuals and side-splitting clowning, and also an artistic recontextualization childhood trauma, making Easy As Pie perfect for the young and Jungian at heart.

BEST ORIGINAL SCRIPT
Nic Stelter and Annie Lovelock, Shifted (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Marisa Quijano-Sirois, Paul C. Tugwell and Justin J. Scarlat, The City Beautiful (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST SOLO SHOW: COMEDY
My Grandmother’s Eyepatch, Clowns Can Dance
The world’s worst eulogy becomes a masterclass in cringe comedy in Julia VanderVeen’s tour de force of tortured dramatic line readings and excruciating audience interaction; her live-action Muppet Show meets Carol Burnett-esque embrace of absurdity made me laugh harder than any other Fringe show this year (at least intentionally).

BEST SOLO SHOW: MUSICAL
Ha Ha Da Vinci, Phinia Pipia (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST SOLO SHOW: DRAMA
Grabbing the Hammer Lane: A Trucker Narrative, Harbour Workshop (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST SOLO SHOW: SPECIALTY
Old God, Splash Time

BEST ENSEMBLE PERFORMANCE
Your Mom’s in My Top 8, God’s Favorite Productions
Producer-performer Adam DelMedico and his kick-ass band brought the final regular audience of the 2023 Festival to their feet with a rousing early-morning concert that was the best pop-punk experience I’ve had since seeing Green Day’s American Idiot on Broadway.

BEST INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE: COMEDY
Jennifer Blocker, A Real Live Fiasco! (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE: DRAMA
Timothy Williams, Multitudes (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE: MUSICAL
Briana Moten, Whiskeyland
I had fundamental issues with this Broadway-bound musical’s book and leading man, but Briana Moten made one-note “Nia” contain multitudes with her roof-ripping renditions (backed by the band If I’m Lucky) of Nik Walker & Liam Nelligan’s Motown-meets-Dropkick Murphys songs.

BEST PLAY: DRAMA
The Vast of Darkness, Whiskey Theatre Factory
Charis Watler’s slow-burn performance as an unqualified astronaut made Bethany Dickens Assaf’s sci-fi thriller the tensest Twilight Zone homage at Fringe since 2016’s SPACE.

BEST PLAY: COMEDY
Dick Sweat: Private Investigator, Orangutan Arts (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST PLAY: MUSICAL
The Office Funeral Party Musical Extravaganza Show, The Renaissance Theatre Co.
The follow-up to last year’s hilarious Office Holiday Party is filled with even more toe-tapping tunes and bad taste, with Sheila’s shiva song in particular being Tony-worthy. And best of all, I could understand every effing word!

BEST DIRECTOR
Valerio Vittorio Garaffa, Marathon (Orlando Weekly review)

BEST SHOW
The Old Man and the Old Moon, Citrus Music
Of all the shows I saw at Orlando Fringe 2023 — 75, to be exact — nothing filled my heart with joy (which then leaked out my eyes) like the inspiring young prodigies who put on this effortless Irish folktale that combines the best qualities of Peter and the Starcatcher and Once. Of all the shows at this year’s festival, this one most deserves to go to Broadway, just as soon as the entire ensemble is old enough to cross state lines.

In addition to the award-winning productions, there were a few shows I didn’t review that were still worthy of remembering:

Field Zoology 101 (Shawn O’Hara) is a like a one-man revival of Disney’s Adventurers Club (minus the overpriced drinks), with a hilarious extra helping of boundary-bending bestiality; I can’t wait to enroll in Level 201, just as soon as I find that venomous spider…. 

John Michael hits the stage like a popper-powered hurricane, making the opening of Spank Bank Time Machine convincingly like experiencing a panic attack, but please stick with this emotionally compelling “trauma clown” as he hysterically agonizes over the overdose deaths plaguing his social circle. If only one life is saved by his harrowing audience-participation Narcan demonstration, this carefully crafted yet bravely unbound show was more than worth it.

For A One Woman Titanic Parody in 59 Minutes or Less, “Bikini” Katie Thayer condensed James Cameron’s first double VHS tape-length epic — and its deleted scenes! — into less than an hour. Not only that, but she made me think about Titanic’s cultural and personal impact for the first time since 1998, while also making me laugh hard enough to choke on my beer.

If Amy Sedaris and Jane Lynch had a baby who became the world's most intense timeshare salesperson, they still probably wouldn't be half as arresting as Linnea Bond in Heart Ripped Out Twice And So Can You,  where she manages to transform some of the most painful medical trauma imaginable into an achingly funny plea for existence.

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!

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Finally, although I was pleased overall with most of the individual performances I experienced over the past few weeks, I was also made very aware of an undercurrent of legitimate concerns coming from artists and patrons alike regarding the Festival’s overall structure. Here are five suggestions I strongly implore the Fringe board of directors to consider implementing before the 33rd festival arrives:

1. The total number of Fringe productions has nearly rebounded to pre-pandemic peaks, but the paying patron count simply hasn’t kept pace, leading more and more artists to complain about underfilled houses. Until after a major marketing push successfully swells attendance from outside the current Fringe-going community, the total number of lottery slots should be capped at 100, instead of spreading the limited wealth among the current 120-plus.

2. To make up for fewer productions, those participating should perform more shows. Ideally, every production should take the stage at least five times (except in special circumstances, like “Fringers of the Future” educational groups), and national/international acts should be allowed up to nine or 10 show times, giving audiences (and critics) more opportunities to help them turn a profit.

3. Fringe’s new downtown ArtSpace has ample potential as the organization’s year-round home. But as an official festival venue, ArtSpace wasn’t an especially successful experience for patrons or many artists, even with a free hourly shuttle van from Loch Haven. It could work if SunRail could be persuaded to run the single stop between the Ren and Church Street outside of their absurdly brief operating hours. Until that happens, ArtSpace should be a “BYOV,” which programs a particular performance genre (such as burlesque) that can draw a distinct crowd.

4. The most consistent complaint heard in reviews here and in the Sentinel, as well as from ordinary patrons, is that the sound quality of the big-cast musicals was almost uniformly awful, making it impossible to understand anyone’s original lyrics. Rather than requiring each production to provide their own wireless systems, Fringe should invest in top-quality microphones and receivers in the Orange and Silver Venues (at minimum), then offer them to groups at cost, along with the services of an experienced sound mixer. Doing so won’t only make individual artists sound better; it will help the Fringe as a whole look more appealing to potential patrons and producers (and review-reading audiences).

5. The Virtual Fringe online ticketing system was an admirable effort, but it simply isn’t “fit for purpose” for patrons, artists or staff, as anyone whose spent hours struggling with it will know. It’s past time for Fringe to move onto a new ticketing platform. Payment systems (like this one) are available to nonprofits offering ticketing, donation and credit card, including ApplePay, services that are 100% free for the organization and patrons. Orlando Fringe could drop the ticketing fee entirely — or transparently take a smaller amount for themselves — while potentially providing better customer service while requiring less volunteer labor. 

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