Beyond the Fringe

It's a long walk down to Dunster House, and a pair of tickets to their version of Beyond the Fringe costs three dollars. Two bucks more gets you the original-cast album and a six-pack of Budweiser.

The script contains some of the best satire written in the last decade. "So That's the Way You Like It," a parody of Shakespeare, is extraordinary funny; The miner's soliloquy, too, is hilarious.

But the Dunster show, despite occasional bright performances, manages to obscure much of the script's brilliance. Director Peter Schandorff allows his actors to telegraph each of the punchlines. This throws off the pace of the show so that, at times, the performance degenerates into a string of jokes--each followed by a blackout. His own smothering of the Lord Russell sequence is the best example of this.

Michael Kapetan deserves recognition for his consistantly good performance. Leonard Lehrman does the never-ending piano number, "And the Same to You," very well. (The repeated insertion of "Ten Thousand Men of Harvard" into the piano score, however, is tiresome.)

Although the performance is not epic, it is still a very funny show in places. Go see it. You can pick up a beer afterwards.