MN Fringe Festival Day 4! Empty Nest (Winner of The Stages of MN Fringe of the Day Award), Fast Death of a Salesman, Silent Movie, I Will Become the Silver Surfer, Muskie, Too Much of a Good Thing, The Importance of Being Eternal

It’s day four of the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and I have now seen 18 shows and awarded three The Stages of MN Fringe of the Day Awards. So just 29 shows and six more Fringe of the Day Awards to go. At the end of the Fest, I’ll have a few additional awards to announce, including the first ever The Stages of MN Improv Best of Fest Award! As you plan your Fringe, I hope my reviews, and particularly the Fringe of the Day Awards, are helping you to make responsible choices. To check out all the shows, go to the Minnesota Fringe website here: https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026. As I do every year, I’ll be posting short reviews of every show I see as fast as I can, including my daily naming of The Stages of MN Fringe of the Day Award winner.

You know, try as I might, I can’t see everything, and that has nothing to do with the price of tea at the Seward Co-op. It simply isn’t possible, I’m not in touch with H.G. Wells anymore and no longer have access to his time machine on weekends. So I encourage you to also follow M’colleagues at http://www.cherryandspoon.com/ and https://letteredintheatre.wordpress.com/. You can also access all of the shows on the fabulous new theater website of the Twin Cities, 79 Seconds on Stage, at https://79seconds.org/. This site is a marvel, if you haven’t checked it out yet, you need to.

Empty Nest hits incredibly close to home. Levi Weinhagen and Laura Zabel’s show is on the surface about becoming empty nesters and opens with their top ten parenting mistakes. But beyond parenting it’s really about this time in the life of a couple. It’s broken up into different segments some done together some individually. Laura’s monologue on menopause is particularly relatable as my wife has been dealing with it for a couple of years and I personally have been going through the change my whole life. Another segment is about finding shared interests. Which for my wife and I is menopause, it’s nice to be with someone who finally understands hot flashes after all these years. This show has a little of everything from theater parody, storytelling, to clowning. For marrieds who have grown children there is a lot that will make you laugh out of recognition. This is truly funny and relatable to me, which is why this is The Stages of MN Fringe of the Day Award Winner!

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/empty-nest

Fast Death of a Salesman was a close second, so close! It confronts an important issue facing theaters today: how to interest young people in the theater. While it does raise questions about how to do so, Dr. Duke Didier’s solutions are hilariously idiotic. He and his theater students are trying an experiment on his 10-year-old nephew, Braedyn. For example, because Braedyn seems to only show interest in things that move quickly, they will perform Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at a speed so fast that the actors cannot even speak the lines. Instead they have been recorded and sped up electronically, and the actors will just lip-sync while acting out the play. Along with the actors, Didier, sorry, Dr. Didier, has hired an auctioneer, who has secretly always dreamed of being onstage. That role is played with comedic brilliance by Steph Callaghan, whose performance alone puts this on the must-see list. But the entire cast is excellent, led by Jeremy Motz (rhymes with “boats”, honestly, I now say that in my head every time I write or say his name). Motz is something of a specialist of the pre show performance. It’s worth being first in line so you don’t miss a moment of his performance as the pompous Dr. Didier, which begins the moment they open the house.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/fast-death-of-a-salesman

This next one hit two of my sweet spots: silent cinema and 3D. Silent Movie is an improv show in which the cast spin three wheels, which will determine what their performance will be about. Ours was a western with a Groundhog Day loop starring Erin Sheppard (one of the company members). Then the cast acts out that scenario in the style of a silent movie for the rest of the runtime. But I left out the best part, it’s in 3D!!!! You can purchase 3D glasses before the show for $2. If you don’t want to fork out for the glasses, you can just close one eye and everything will appear normally, but in 2D. I recommend the glasses, as the 3D is amazing! There aren’t really any “poppy-outies,” but the depth is incredible. It feels like you are actually in the room with the actors; I caught myself reaching out and trying to touch them several times. Like all improv, a good concept isn’t enough, you have to have a great cast, and this is. They are called The Improv Movement Project, which, as the name implies, means they are very heavy into movement. This is very physical improv; not even bullets are allowed to go unperformed.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/silent-movie-

I Will Become the Silver Surfer. I Will Protect You. is the first solo show from An Alleged Theatre Company member Jake Mierva, who also wrote and directed Fast Death of a Salesman, which I saw earlier in the day. Well known for their comedic shows, this starts out with a sense that it will be a nerd-out comedic show, and what Mierva does throughout the show physically is definitely humorous. The words he is saying are not. To be clear, that isn’t a criticism, it’s intentional. The physical acts as a counterpoint to the character’s explanation of his struggles in life; his traumas are a part of this very dark script. It’s an uneasy balance that, to be honest, Mierva doesn’t always find. It’s an odd show, not funny enough (again, intentionally) for folks who are looking for laughs, but perhaps too funny for those Fringers who are more into the serious monologue shows about a person’s trauma and mental health struggles. One thing it does accomplish is showing us that Mierva is capable of both comedy and drama. It doesn’t fail or succeed but lies in that uneasy place between the two, reserved for a very specific Fringer.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/i-will-become-the-silver-surfer-i-will-protect-you

Muskie is the first of two Jaws parodies I’ll be seeing at this year’s Fringe; the other is called Chum!, which is a musical. Which reminds me of that year in the late 1990s when Hollywood put out competing volcano movies. This one is set during the fishing opener competition on Lake Mille Lacs. The night before the opening, a young man disappears while skinny-dipping when he is pulled under by something in the water. It’s up to a disgraced fisherman and his sister, the sheriff, to convince the mayor to shut down the competition and get everyone off the lake so they can go fishing for the mythical muskie. I would like to highlight the performance of Maija Dahlberg who plays Alex a young scout who participates in the fishing opener. The whole cast is fun, but on a stage full of adult actors this young actor steals the show. Filled with MN humor and a wonderful muskie puppet, this one’s a lot of fun for fans of Jaws, hotdish, and PBR.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/muskie

Too Much of a Good Thing is a solo show by Rachel Redleaf about her breasts. Specifically, about her relationship with them, from her childhood wish for breats to the point where she realized you have to be careful what you wish for. Ending her breast development at size H, Each weighing 8 lbs. she comes to the decision that reduction surgery is the right choice for her. Redleaf injects her mamologue with a lot of humor, but there are also some dark moments along the pink path her story follows. Redleaf shares a lot in order to fully tell her story, and it’s because of that openness that her show feels complete. The show definitely has a sexual side, but don’t come expecting to be titillated, this isn’t burlesque. You will laugh, you will see Redleaf handle her breasts a lot, but you are going to gain an understanding of what real life is like for someone who has been given too much of a good thing.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/too-much-of-a-good-thing

The Importance of Being Eternal is a mash-up of vampires and Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. It works surprisingly well, and aside from either a forgotten line or missed technical cue, which seemed to bring the show to a standstill for what was probably less than a minute but must have felt like ten to the cast, it’s extremely slick. The contrast between the manners of Victorian England in Wilde’s original and the eroticism of the vampiric world provides a lot of the play’s crowd-pleasing content. The crowd I saw the show with at 10:00 PM on a sunday night was extremely lively for a play about the undead. If vampires are one of your erotic turns, you’re going to lust for this play. To be truthful, I did feel a little old for this show. I probably would have enjoyed it more at an earlier time slot, when people my age were still up and attending shows. It is clever, sexy, and a lot of fun, but speaking only for myself, I think this is a young person’s show, particularly if you went through a Twilight phase, which I didn’t.

https://minnesotafringe.org/shows/2026/the-importance-of-being-eternal

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