While more people delude themselves into diddling with Claude and calling his ejaculate artistry, the theater stands as a fortress of integrity, sparing nobody from creative humbling. Nowhere is it more clear that every aspect of a piece of art is the product of a decision. What a great time for the organically intelligent to get their butts in seats at the Minnesota Fringe Festival, running now through August 16.
Minnesota Fringe presents over 100 plays selected by random lottery, offering a uniquely democratic opportunity for artists to woo audiences in landmark Twin Cities venues. The only parameter for submission is that shows must be less than an hour with unfussy technical demands.
Most Fringe theaters are concentrated in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and the University of Minnesota’s West Bank, but a total of 13 Minneapolis spaces host performances. In a single day, these venues rotate through a slate of up to seven shows, turning the stage, company, and audience over in 30-minute windows.
It is impossible to curate a Fringe lineup the way most are accustomed to optimizing their media diet. This is a strength of the festival, not a weakness. Independent theater offers a rare chance to resist the refinement that dominates our routines. Without the aid of an algorithm to guide your slate of tickets, you have the opportunity to recalibrate your artistic tastes.
Most Fringe shows are world premieres of original works by self-starter operations. The best tools at your decisionmaking disposal are the show’s promotional materials, the festival website’s aggregated audience reviews, and a hodgepodge of local blogs run by Fringe devotees.
I find these tools unreliable. Fringe shows can be amateur by nature, so who am I to judge a lackluster marketing job? And even more than other art forms, I find the Twin Cities theater scene frustratingly insular. Small-world connections and chronic Minnesota niceness make local theater criticism especially, well, uncritical, prone to hyperbole and sugarcoating.
This makes it hard to convert stubborn friends who swear off the theater on principle, imagining every prospective ticket is the magnum opus of a uniquely stunted Disney adult. There’s an annoying trend to advertise Fringe’s potential range of weirdness as an inherent virtue. “Where else could you possibly see [insert Minnesota twist on classic here] AND [insert esoteric nerdy improv conceit here]???” The real winners should stand on their own without this phantom scatterplot as a point of comparison.
But I remain a believer in the power of performance! With trepidation, I set out to be the best festivalgoer I could, critical but fair in hopes of finding a gem. On opening night, I undertook a Fringe binge, attending a show in each of the evening’s four hourlong time slots.
Instead of attempting to strategize a balanced lineup, I surrendered to the impossibility of the task and fed the shows to a random choice generator. The resulting schedule was predictably scattered and surprisingly heavy on adaptations.
Though this tactic was completely self-initiated, I still regretted the lack of shows that caught my eye. Well, whatever, I had to abide by my vision. Would local company Melancholics Anonymous live up to the hype of Fringes past? Would I enjoy the Super Mario Bros. parody musical as little as I suspected I would? There was only one way to find out.
Cyrano by Small Waves Theater
Theatre in the Round
The day started with a genderswapped rendition of this favorite from the French canon. If you’re not familiar with Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, you likely know one of the remakes it inspired, like the 1940s film Love Letters, the musical Calvin Berger, or the sappy sapphic Netflix movie The Half of It. For their sophomore Fringe effort, Small Waves opts for a cut of the original text. You only really need to know the gist: our protagonist, unlucky in love, ghostwrites correspondence to their crush on behalf of a more attractive competitor. Hijinks ensue.
By now, I think audience members should demand more from genderswapped casting than the cheap thrills of a same-sex smooch. Here, the decision yields mixed results due to the lack of considered dramaturgy. Because the set is limited to furniture, it is entirely up to the actors to establish a sense of place that situates Cyrano’s lesbian leanings. Some lines are exaggerated to emphasize queer readings of the text, but the characterization of French society is mostly left to Rostand.
I didn’t quite know what to make of the queer elements. Was there a homophobic risk in Cyrano’s desire or was this production imagining a more utopian ideal? Why did this interpretation allow some women to serve in the military, but not the beloved Roxane?
Some actors made committed choices that didn’t always land, turning scenes into mismatched collages of accents and unreactive physical quirks. This was exacerbated by the audience’s bizarre tendency to laugh at every line said in an expressive or odd voice, making it difficult to discern the script’s shifts between comedy and drama.
A few capable cast members overcome these hurdles with a vivacious command of the alexandrine verse. As Ragueneau, Abagail Aune brings a refreshing lightness to the play’s crowded ensemble scenes. Madison Lang transforms Cyrano’s intellectual swagger into a worthy feminine weapon in a battle of the wits against male rivals.
Most notably, Katie Grace Hennen pulls off a stunning show of grief as Roxane in the final acts. Despite Cyrano’s tonal distractions, this production forges a completely original dynamic between the two leads, transcending the boxes that limit more prescribed queer romances.
After the first show, I scarfed down some Chipotle at a dangerous pace. (I was hoping to dine at more of a neighborhood standard, but tight Fringe schedules make hard times for Hard Times.) I hiked over to the U of MN campus, where buzz was accumulating at the Rarig Center.
It’s-A-Me, A Musical! by Albino Squirrel Productions
Rarig Stoll Thrust Theater
I can’t say I consider Mario and Luigi dear friends. I mostly associate them with frustrating GameCube sessions micromanaged by my older brother. In no rush to revisit these mustachioed plumbers, I felt the gravity of my pledge to randomness when wheelofnames.com spit out this musical Nintendo parody for my second show.
After reading up, though, I was intrigued by Albino Squirrel Productions’ spin on the form. Rather than merely riff on assorted Mario mythology, this show takes the lampooned 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie as source material. I have only vague memories of watching this as a kid, so was unsure of my ability to parse the original film’s questionable choices from a stage adaptation’s. Unfortunately, this team did not dispel my hesitations.
The numbers themselves provide little in the way of fan service. Instead of leveraging the abundant Nintendo jingles at their disposal, Daisy and Luigi struggle through some Elphaba-and-Fiyero harmonies over generic keyboard accompaniments.
All parodies face the challenge of juggling their references. It’s-a-Me, A Musical! has way too many mucking up its pipes. Why is a Mario musical in 2026 asking the audience to laugh at a Christian Mingle joke? Inside baseball Broadway lore, head-scratching Stranger Things namedrops, and a painfully out-of-place cameo from Parks and Rec’s Jean-Ralphio made more sense when I noticed the script was penned in 2016. It really could have used a revamp beyond a few details borrowed from the franchise’s 2023 blockbuster.
The prevalence of short-form video comedy has raised the audience bar for impressions. Insanely good imitations of any iconic character are only a few keystrokes away. This acted against the leads, who struggled to conjure their iconic characters apart from the aid of costumes. Mario’s simple 8-bit visual language should make production design in the substantial space an easy homerun. But apart from a pipe, throne, and mystery block, the stage was puzzlingly bare.
Thankfully, a few hilarious and energetic standouts level up the show. Bowser brings the house down with a shocking vibrato and playwright Bryn Tanner delivers a brilliant cartoony inflection to King Aster. Two Shy Guys put even the most dedicated cosplayers to shame with a controlled and entertaining pantomime. Wario and Waluigi take the cake, though, always giving the audience the exaggerated ridiculousness we came to see.
After bows, Luigi left us with an impassioned reminder: “Video games are fun, they’re not weird. They just make you full of whimsy!”
I left the theater as disappointed as the impatient kid in the row behind me, who kept wondering aloud about the absence of Princess Peach, Yoshi, and Toad. I’ll spare you a full State of the Whimsy address, but I think we’re not quite mastering childlike play if it’s incomprehensible to children.
At the night’s halfway point, my partner and I stepped out for a needed breath of fresh air while the Stoll Thrust transformed. Our Mario dissection was interrupted by a frantic stage manager asking for a cigarette. Not for a smoke break, but because an actor forgot a prop. Another delight of Fringe!
Watership Down by Melancholics Anonymous
Rarig Stoll Thrust Theater
My third show was yet another adaptation, brightening the dark bunny tale Watership Down with folk music. This production was an original premiere spearheaded by Melancholics Anonymous, a young, buzzy troupe that puts on new work year round. I’ve heard many people laud their previous Fringe debuts, so I was excited to check this one out.
I could tell from the show’s first moments that unlike a few of its unlucky rabbits, it would sidestep the obvious snares. These actors aren’t playing around, achieving a committed level of professionalism that stomped out any potential anthropomorphic hokiness. A live band and gorgeous vocal harmonies cut through the space, cleansing the spores of the Mushroom Kingdom. The Stoll became a nostalgic domain more akin to Warriors, Milo and Otis, and Over the Garden Wall.
Folk musicals can be tricky. Even standards like Spring Awakening and Hadestown lose some Broadway magic with their inclination towards singer-songwriter influences. While Watership Down’s numbers sound lovely, I found them too expository and even-keeled. With a cast of nine, the lyrics could have benefitted from less folklore and more specificity to flesh out its ensemble.
A strength of the musical form is its ability to pause amid the action and let a character spill their psyche. Here, though, the music mostly provided Decemberisty ambience, reinforcing a fairytale tone that the production already capably established without it. Simple rhyme schemes were outshone by their accompaniment.
Musicals only sound as professional as their weakest singer. Composers Bee Davis and Timothy Kelly anchor the cast with impressive vocals, perfectly attuned to the folksy register. The rest were decent, but dexterity certainly fluctuated as the solos hopped from rabbit to rabbit.
The Melancholics got their start at St. Olaf College, evidenced here by costuming that favors liberal artsy wardrobe staples like boots, cords, and vests. This often made it difficult to tell the hares apart despite varied flourishes to their bunny ears. The script relies heavily on third-person narration cribbed from the original text and split between the actors, which didn’t do much to help discern them.
The production was strongest when it leaned into the source material’s horror aspects. Red lights and eerie strings created a real sense of terror, effectively generating real empathy for the animals’ plight. A magnificent puppet reveal near the end was genuinely showstopping, giving Christopher Nolan’s Cyclops a run for his money.
Though Watership Down is still finding its footing, it made for an admirable and entertaining show. It’s promising to see a company at the festival strive for such a high standard.
Three down, one to go. I felt atypically alert for 10 p.m. on a Thursday. While I’d yet to see a masterpiece, all were certainly thrilling. I descended to the Rarig’s basement for the final show.
Latin Papi by CuerpoxCuerpo
Rarig Nolte Xperimental Theater
The last performance of the night took a hard pivot out of cutesy, a homoerotic contemporary dance piece by Fringe returner CuerpoxCuerpo. I can safely say I would have chosen this one for myself.
Dancers Armani Colon and Gabriel Mata enter with gusto, making excellent use of the basement theater’s catwalk. In a voiceover, Colon flirts with the audience over a rousing club beat while gyrating against the rail: “Welcome to Latin Papi. Your husband doesn’t know.”
From the start, the two performers had the audience in the palm of their limp-wristed hands, eliciting bachelorette party shrieks from onlookers in every row. They began with thumping Reggaeton, unbuttoning their shirts while hopping in and out of a spotlight.
As the men stripped, the music evolved, transitioning between narration and instrumentals. The backing track teased the audience too, faking out the end of a portion before catapulting us back into the throes of percussion. At times, the sound mixing was a bit too abrupt, distracting from the dancers’ seamless physicality.
The burlesque tone added a helpful ticking clock element to the show—the dancers can only get so naked. Colon and Mata enchanted with each reveal, leaping across the stage with remarkable smoothness despite wearing several layers of pants.
In Latin Papi, the bareness of an intimate Fringe stage becomes an incredible asset. With nothing else to look at, we can’t help but be captivated by each and every gesture. It was thrillingly unclear whether the two dancers intended to seduce each other or the audience.
Though narratively thin, the arc of the piece surprised me as the Latin music suddenly dissipated into ambient tones. The drums drifted away and voiceover resurfaced, the men growing more physically intimate and morphing into one tableau. Their heavy breathing in a moment of rest made the erotic audible.
In each other’s arms, Mata and Colon became more than just a pair of bodies. Arms and legs took on new meaning, the way a familiar word starts to sound entirely different when repeated. I might be projecting too much meaning onto this shift in the piece, but it started to resemble the tonal beats of a lively night out, retreating from the dancefloor to the bedroom to the vastness of your own head.
“The same hands he uses to work are the ones he caresses the body with,” says Colon, dressing himself once again. “Aftercare papi. Influencer papi. DL papi. Trade papi.”
Latin Papi makes beautiful use of choreography, expanding Latinidad beyond the macho with richly varied expressions of the body. Though it was my smallest production of the day, it was a grand finale.
