Orlando Fringe 2025 review: ‘1-Man No-Show’

If the Great Gonzo were a black beret-wearing bearded beatnik artiste (instead of a blue weirdo with Dave Golez’s hand up his ass) he probably would have produced a Fringe show very much like Isaac Kessler’s 1-Man No-Show, an Andy Kaufman-esque trainwreck that had me rolling in the Yellow Venue’s aisles.

Kessler encouraged me to write my review while his show was in progress, on the assumption that anything I experienced at the press preview might never appear in subsequent performances, so it doesn’t really matter what I say. Under Gordon Neill’s direction, Kessler engages in theatrical tomfoolery like shadow-fucking and minimalist eyeball choreography, while exhorting his befuddled audience to heckle him. The hour I attended featured an endlessly spiraling fever dream of audience participatory improvisation, groan-worthy visual puns and slapstick physical comedy; there was an injured ankle routine recalling Danny Kaye’s schtick in White Christmas and bubble gum-chewing and banana-tossing bits that would make the Blue Man Group gag.

After 60 minutes of listening to Kessler shrieking over a scratchy battery-powered microphone at his shanghaied spotlight operators [warning: strobe lights!] and other victim-cum-volunteers — he even managed to drag the Orlando Sentinel’s Matt Palm onstage for a painfully protracted finger-pointing dance — 1-Man No-Show inevitably left me with more questions than answers, such as: Has the show started yet? Does this thing actually have a script? And most importantly, WTF did I just watch?

Aficionados of refined fine art should probably cross the Loch Haven parking lot and go visit OMA instead. But if you’re up for an hour of unbridled idiocy, this surreal solo spin on The Play That Goes Wrong is an exercise in unapologetic anarchic absurdism that’s well worth showing up for.

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This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.