Laura Ingalls Wilder is getting a makeover and an East Coast dressing down as Chicago playwrights Becky Eldridge and Amy Peterson present their creation, “Little House on the Parody,” at the New York International Fringe Festival this week. As the title clearly suggests, the musical stage production parodies Ingalls Wilder’s nineteenth-century Midwestern frontier saga as well as the Michael Landon television adaptation. The show already had a successful run at the Theatre Building in Chicago in the winter of 2003 and Eldridge is proud to report that the Fringe Festival version “has an all-Chicago cast…with almost all of the originals returning.” Now the company is looking to break into the New York scene. Eldridge jokingly explains “Our hopes are that some super-rich billionaire will see it and want to put it on Broadway.” Fresh off the success of her most recent comedy, “Band Geeks: A Halftime Musical,” Eldridge admits that this newfound theatrical prosperity can be hard to digest at times. “We’re out here at the Fringe Festival,” she adds, “and we keep looking around at each other and saying ‘how the fuck did this happen?'”
By Way of Party: A Preview of SPRUNG at Sleeping Village This Saturday, Sleeping Village will become a petri dish for the femme and queer-led performance extravaganza the Fly Honey Show. In the lab will be three mad geniuses of party chemistry.
Humdrum Horror: A Review of “The Birthday Party” at City Lit Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” suggests that what we think of as the habits of ordinary life are often a kind of smokescreen designed to block awareness of underlying arrangements and realities.
