Guess I’ve got sound instincts. While in L.A., I saw six shows out of the hundreds available at the Hollywood Fringe Festival. Of those, two (Girl Band in the Men’s Room and Lost Moon Radio) received “Freaks” awards, the main audience-choice honors for this fringe.
On the other hand, a Hollywood Fringe production of Cowboy Mouth which roused only indignation on Engine28 from both myself and fellow NEA/Annenberg fellow Kathryn Osenlund earned an extended run as one of the 25 shows deemed “Best of Fringe” by Theatre Asylum Venue Manager Matt Quinn.

I notice that most of the Freaks victors were reviewed by me or by my esteemed Engine28 colleagues. It’s possible that the attention given some of these shows from reviews at Engine28 and elsewhere may have helped attract audiences which in turn fomented the Freaks honors. To that, I say “Cool!” Fringe festivals need and deserve as much coverage as they can get. The L.A. Theatre Review, which both blogged and distributed a daily print review broadsheet, was especially exhaustive and industrious, but a number of L.A. media outlets weighed in on the fest. The shows were certainly eager to be reviewed, and it was nice to be a part of the groundswell. I was still getting offers to come review shows for days after I’d returned home to Connecticut.

Standards of the shows I did catch were generally very high—most had professional lighting and sound, complex set designs, original projections (from slides to full-blown rock videos) and appropriate props.

To someone coming from out of town, however, the biggest impression of the Hollywood Fringe might have been how many solid small-theater spaces there are along Santa Monica Blvd. We’re not talking vacant storefronts here but real workable black-boxes with high ceilings and comfortable seats. The oft-asked question while we were investigating L.A. was “Is this a theater town?” I think that stretch of Santa Monica, and the hundreds of Hollywood Fringe events, screamed “Yes!” in a way that can’t be countered sanely.

Full list of Fringe winners here.

Another of the shows I caught that same night, Charlie! The Death of Nancy Fullforce by Jasten King, has so many preview, rehearsal, promotional and other videos on YouTube that if you strung them together they’d almost run as long as the show itself. I’m most interested in this one, a proper music video made for Charlie!’s opening number “Dead or Alive,” back when Nancy Fullforce was a band and not a theatrical enterprise.

I’m still in L.A. The pop-up Engine 28, for which I and 20 fellow Fellows from USC Annenberg’s NEA Arts Journalism Institute for Theater been working all week, has popped back down and won’t be adding any new stories or posts. The site was a purposefully short-lived thing, which we loaded up with hundreds of articles, posts and videos in a mere five days. Those stories will remain up, so go read ‘em and let us know how we did. Some of the shows reviewed by us, particularly at the Hollywood Fringe, are still running for another week, and the The National Asian American Theater Festival is just getting started. The Theatre Communications Group conference and the Radar L.A. festival—the main events we covered at Engine28—finished up over the weekend.

I’ve seen 11 shows since I’ve been here. Links below are to my own writings, but there are plenty of others weighing in on most of these shows at Engine28:

Tuesday: Travis Preston & Poor Dog Group’s stage adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Brewsie & Willie in a loft space downtown.

Wednesday: Rude Mechs’ The Method Gun at the Kirk Douglas Theater in L.A. (part of the Radar L.A. festival).

Thursday: Teatro Linea de Sombra’s Amarillo at Redcat (Radar L.A.)

Friday: Three Hollywood Fringe pieces: Cynthia Glucksman’s one-act comp CODA: The Debut Album at Complex Theatre, the gay glam rock murder mystery Charlie! The Death of Nancy Fullhouse and Girl Band in the Men’s Room (both at Fringe Annex).

Saturday: Paul F. Tompkin’s live Pod F. Tompkast at Largo at the Coronet.

Sunday: Back to the Fringe for Larry Blum’s idiosyncratic stageside career retrospective BLINK and You’ll Miss Me (Theatre Asylum), the musical comedy karma of Lost Moon Radio Episode 10 (Fringe Mainstage) and Hungry River Theatre Co.’s credulity-challenged Cowboy Mouth (back to Theatre Asylum). Then I caught the calming if kinetic coda of  Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and the Farewell Speech at L.A. Theatre Center (Radar L.A.).

Not to mention all those lectures, symposia, parties, pitch proposal round tables and late-night HBO in the hotel room.

On the other hand, I missed The Fleshtones at Cafe Nine back in New Haven.

If my output on this site dims this week, yet you still wonder what I think of the state of American theater these days, head to the just-launched Engine28.com.

The site, which magically appeared last night at midnight and will last for just a week, represents the hopes and glories of dozens of journalists who’ve gathered under the banner of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s 2011 NEA Institute in Theater and Musical Theater.

That onerous academic-sounding title scares me, as does the mere concept of school, yet I was the guy responsible for threading it as nimbly as possible through the introductory article which you’ll find on the site’s homepage today.

Luckily for me, thus far this NEA/Annenberg experience (which began Monday and lasts through June 22) has resembled a newsroom more than it has a classroom. We’ve been on the ground covering stories since day one. Even when we do amass for a lecture or discussion, there’s usually a fancy meal involved.