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"Flamingo/Winnebago' at Fringe Festival
Steve Cohen
Getting there is (not) half the fun
STEVE COHEN
Flamingo/Winnebago is an ambitious creation by the playwright and director Thaddeus Phillips. It’s a road drama with incidental music but not specifically a musical show.
The separate quests of two men intersect. Both yearn to discover America, and what they encounter is disturbing. The environment is perilous and the nation’s– indeed, the world’s– future is bleak.
A New Jersey gas station owner, originally from India (Muni Kulasinghe) closes his Sinclair outlet (its symbol was a dinosaur; get it?) and heads for California to see the paradise once described to him by his grandfather. He picks up a hitchhiker (Phillips) also heading for Vegas, where his late grandfather was PR manager for the Flamingo Hotel (as was, in fact, Phillips’s own grandfather.)
Their adventures on the road contain some humor and some trenchant comments about America’s past and future, particularly about the depletion of the world’s oil supply. The playwright warns us that the world’s oil supply will be gone in 50 years and cause the end of air travel and the car culture. But some editing of the first half of the play would help. The audience has been told where these men are heading, and why, and we want them to get there, the sooner the better. The play now runs two hours with no intermission and needs to be shorter.
Only when Phillips reaches the Flamingo does the action become gripping. Flamingo/Winnebago has a dramatic and touching plot twist in Vegas and an even more poignant conclusion of the other man’s journey. Its projections, sets and other visuals are impressive. But a much-publicized 3-D sequence is a letdown and could be cut. When the audience dons special glasses, we are reminded how Las Vegas visitors experienced something similar in the 1950s when they were herded onto tour buses to watch atomic explosions in the desert. It’s more than a gimmick, but its payoff isn’t worth the distraction from the main plot.
The idea of experiencing America partly through the eyes of an outsider born in India is good. But Kulasinghe’s words are sometimes inaudible because he doesn’t project his voice and uses an overly exaggerated accent. Phillips, on the other hand, is natural and appealing as he plays his own character.
Music by the Albuquerque band Le Chat Lunatique is superb, and Jeremy Wilhelm does a fine turn as an Elvis impersonator and in multiple other roles. The set and projections are impressive.
With his creative team, Lucidity Suitcase, Phillips has written and staged other dramas involving travel that I’d like to see produced again. Red Eye to Havre de Grace, for example, imagines the last days of Edgar Allan Poe, who set out from Virginia to New York in 1849 and five days later was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. That play skillfully employs fragments of a dozen Poe tales and poems, historical accounts, wild set design and music to dramatize the poet’s pathetic last days.
STEVE COHEN
Flamingo/Winnebago is an ambitious creation by the playwright and director Thaddeus Phillips. It’s a road drama with incidental music but not specifically a musical show.
The separate quests of two men intersect. Both yearn to discover America, and what they encounter is disturbing. The environment is perilous and the nation’s– indeed, the world’s– future is bleak.
A New Jersey gas station owner, originally from India (Muni Kulasinghe) closes his Sinclair outlet (its symbol was a dinosaur; get it?) and heads for California to see the paradise once described to him by his grandfather. He picks up a hitchhiker (Phillips) also heading for Vegas, where his late grandfather was PR manager for the Flamingo Hotel (as was, in fact, Phillips’s own grandfather.)
Their adventures on the road contain some humor and some trenchant comments about America’s past and future, particularly about the depletion of the world’s oil supply. The playwright warns us that the world’s oil supply will be gone in 50 years and cause the end of air travel and the car culture. But some editing of the first half of the play would help. The audience has been told where these men are heading, and why, and we want them to get there, the sooner the better. The play now runs two hours with no intermission and needs to be shorter.
Only when Phillips reaches the Flamingo does the action become gripping. Flamingo/Winnebago has a dramatic and touching plot twist in Vegas and an even more poignant conclusion of the other man’s journey. Its projections, sets and other visuals are impressive. But a much-publicized 3-D sequence is a letdown and could be cut. When the audience dons special glasses, we are reminded how Las Vegas visitors experienced something similar in the 1950s when they were herded onto tour buses to watch atomic explosions in the desert. It’s more than a gimmick, but its payoff isn’t worth the distraction from the main plot.
The idea of experiencing America partly through the eyes of an outsider born in India is good. But Kulasinghe’s words are sometimes inaudible because he doesn’t project his voice and uses an overly exaggerated accent. Phillips, on the other hand, is natural and appealing as he plays his own character.
Music by the Albuquerque band Le Chat Lunatique is superb, and Jeremy Wilhelm does a fine turn as an Elvis impersonator and in multiple other roles. The set and projections are impressive.
With his creative team, Lucidity Suitcase, Phillips has written and staged other dramas involving travel that I’d like to see produced again. Red Eye to Havre de Grace, for example, imagines the last days of Edgar Allan Poe, who set out from Virginia to New York in 1849 and five days later was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. That play skillfully employs fragments of a dozen Poe tales and poems, historical accounts, wild set design and music to dramatize the poet’s pathetic last days.
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