Philly Fringe 2024: Michael Galligan presents Cloud Baby

What follows is an amusing enough hour of clowning, directed by Bailey Nassetta, in which Cloud Baby discovers the world. It’s mostly engaging for Galligan’s wide-eyed performance, informed by audience interaction that will provide considerable variation from show to show. By the finale, however, the piece hasn’t moved beyond its initial tone and settles for shallow thematic waters, more a sketch than a fully realized expression.

Eager and patient

In the first and strongest sequence, Cloud Baby remains nestled in his cocoon, gleefully forming noises to echo the audience. Every laugh, each shuffle and cough, becomes a new aural morsel for him to play with, sounds that eventually tumble into words. A word cloud, projected overhead, documents the new additions to his lexicon: eyebrow raise, throat clearing, I, you. This is where the show’s conceit is at its most refined, Galligan at once insatiably eager and incredibly patient. He limits himself here to the raw material he receives from the audience, savoring each new word as a meal into itself and trusting that new cacophony will continually come.

Experience needed

From here, Cloud Baby emerges from his stasis in platform heels and lumpy posture, flinging cotton about the stage. He makes shapes from the “clouds” and invites us to do the same, deepening his childlike understanding of the world, and it’s admittedly quite fun to see what the audience devises (in our case, birds and pizza). It’s not much of a heightening, though, from our previous language games, and feels particularly monotonous for Cloud Baby’s constant naivete.

A character like this, so supreme in innocence, seems to demand a tumble into experience: the sharp edges of the world, an initiation into pain. The piece flirts with such moments—rain spouting from Cloud Baby’s hands, a storm brewing on the horizon—but they are only regarded with his same general wonderment, never attendant with any true discomfort. Absent such a tonal shift, Cloud Baby is in the end unsatisfactorily static, and the piece an airy pantomime on the ephemerality of all things. Like clouds, birds and pizza too shall dissipate into their formless origins. It’s a cute notion, but it doesn’t land with any real weight, the piece never inviting the depth of feeling needed to portray it.

The final coda underscores this problem, a song-and-dance that literalizes the show’s themes but leaves the character seemingly incomplete. Cloud Baby dons a wig and croons, cabaret-style, an ode to the many-sidedness of clouds. It’s an apt thematic summary, and entertaining, as always, for Galligan’s starry-eyed commitment, but before we can see how it has affected him—or whether, indeed, it has affected him—he has disappeared also into a suffusion of mist.

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