MEDEA has officially become an award-winning production!!


The LA Theatre Review, the official newsletter of the Hollywood Fringe, voted MEDEA as Best Ensemble of the Fringe!! Only 4 awards were given by LATR for 176 shows, and we got one of them! Follow this link to see the official LATR announcement!


One last review from our new LA friend Marcus Kaye:



Medea at The Complex Theatres

I saw this one on my own, with no prompt from the LA Theatre Review. In fact, the very reason I went was because, as I was standing outside and waiting for Dancing with Crazies to start two Thursdays ago, I ran struck up a conversation with a boy with feathers in his hair. This boy was Ryan Mullins, of PaperStrangers and he was a part of the cast ofMedea. He told me to come to the show and you know what.... I did.

Best decision I could have made. Michael Burke's interpretation of Medea was BREATHTAKING. Gorgeous. Haunting. Creepy. Wonderful. Powerful. Emotional. I was captivated by the precision of the chorus, the emotional depth of Medea (Melissa Fenton), and the two staring children hanging from the rafters.

Technically this show was spectacular and while this review is essentially me using words to tell you how amazing the performances is, nothing I say can do it (and it's feather motif) justice. It's coming to the DC Fringe and I suggest, nay urge, anyone in the area at the time to drop what they're doing and go find out how Medea could kill her children. Kudos to Burke and his PaperStrangers company. They quickly became Fringe friends of mine, and several drinks in - I'm going to miss them. They're a phenomenal, talented group and I can't wait to see what they put on next.




And finally, today we take off for Washington D.C. for the Capital Fringe!! We're giving ourselves a week to get there and stopping off in Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Nashville before finally stopping to see the July 4 festivities in the nation's capital.  It's been a fun and challenging ride in LA, but now its on to a week of fun and then back to hitting the pavement for one last Fringe festival! 


Cheers,
Amanda

After closing the show to an oversold-out crowd in Cincinnati, we made the 2 1/2 day marathon journey through the desert to Hollywood, California!  


We are staying with the grandmother of a friend of the director's, and Doris is an absolute dream.  Such a beautiful home and beds for us all! The beach is a 15 minute walk down the street and it is so wonderful to see the ocean again and wiggle my toes in the sand.  Not to mention the fresh fruit in Cali is to die for!


The show opened this Thursday at the Complex.  We've been doing as much street marketing as possible, however so far it has been somewhat of an uphill struggle, seeing as we could only arrive 1 day in advance of the show due to the timing of the Cincy Fringe.  We're gonna keep pounding the pavement to get folks in to see this show though!  Thanks to the amazing patronage both in Indianapolis and Cincinnati, we know we have a great show on our hands, its just a matter of getting the word out to the people of LA.  This is the very first year for the Hollywood Fringe and there's an unbelievably huge number of shows (100+), so its bound to be challenging. In fact, there are the same number of groups performing in the Complex alone as was in the entire Cincy Fringe! 


Please keep your fingers crossed for us, and if you know anyone in or around the LA area, please tell them about our show, which you can see tonight or tomorrow night at 7pm or Thurs-Sun at 7pm all next weekend!

Pictures to come!

Cheers!

Only one performance left of a very successful run of MEDEA at this year's CincyFringe!  Our final performance will be this Friday at 7:30PM at Duveneck 2, 1214 Vine St.  We've been having very full and even sell-out houses and we hope to keep the momentum going all the way to LA and DC! 


As a cast we've been eating lots of crepes (It's Just Crepes! needs to open a location in EVERY city!!!!), doing lots of yoga, hanging out at Hamburger Mary's where we caught a surprise drag show, experiencing Cincy's guerilla gay bar scene, and loitering in our favorite local coffee shop, Iris Bookcafe.  After some housing confusion we now have our own wonderful apartment for us out of towners in the dorms of the Cincy Art Academy (free housing provided by the Fringe itself!).  Definitely have to thank the Norbut's, our SM's family, for taking us in while we tried to find some place to stay. The apts are really nice and it's been a lot of fun hanging out and partying with the other artists.  We also attended the 1st Annual Fringe Prom and have been seeing lots of theatre.  


Cincinnati is a very arts friendly city and an interesting and eclectic place.  Considering before this all I knew of Cincy was the Reds, this has been an eye-opening experience. I'll be sad to see it go but I'm sure LA will be full of its own crazy adventures.  We'll be staying in the OC with a friend of our director's grandmother (haha). That is if we survive the crazy drive through the desert to get there in less than 3 days!


Cheers!


(a few more pics below!) 

The fringe tour of MEDEA has finally started!  

We arrived on Monday and immediately tech'd in our space, Duveneck 2. We are now joined by our stage manager Megyn Norbut and I think we're all going to get along great. Sleeping arrangements are still somewhat tenuous but Megyn's family has generously opened their home to us for at least a few days.  They even cooked out for us and Megyn led a few of us in some fantastic yoga! Meanwhile I'm going to start a box to mail home because I simply have too much stuff! It's hard to pack for 2 months in a duffel bag...but we have limited car space.

Last night we blanketed Cincy with postcards while wearing our paperStrangers t-shirts and got some interesting looks and definitely got noticed (we're hard to miss).  We kicked off the visual fringe party at the Art Academy.  Great 'cajun folk' band and an interesting crowd for sure.  The whole crowd then migrated to the Know Theatre Underground with more bands, food, and a bar for the official Fringe kickoff.  I think we all had a great time, and MEDEA seems to be on a lot of people's "must see" lists.  We were actually featured on the front page of the A&E section of the Cincinnati Enquirer as one of the "Finest of the Fringe" as well as the very front page of MetroMix.  Very exciting!


Tonight is opening night at our venue Duveneck 2, 1214 Vine St. at 7:30PM. Tickets are only $12 and the show is about an hour long.  We'll be hard to miss parading the streets in costume before the show.  You can always purchase tickets in advance at www.cincyfringe.com  Hope to see you there!!


Check out pictures from our first couple days below!