By Ernest Kearney — This show on the scourge of the sexual revolution, described as “an interactive, one woman musical comedy,” provides Cherise Pascual with the opportunity of blitzing the audience like a miniature methed-out Panzer tank: She sings, she dances, she plays a cast of 1000s, she shows her films, she parodies John Lennon’s “Imagine,” she relates her sexual awakening, she confesses her drug addiction in an elaborate sendoff of Gilligan’s Island;
Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale
A tale of a fateful trip
That started from a gram a day…”
She provides the audience with rain jackets, sprays the audience with a super-sized water blaster (hence the jackets), gives us her medical history, treats us to a brief dissertation on herpes simplex virus and encases herself in faux “blow.” She performs for us as her boyfriends, her mother, her doctors, her herpes!
This show is over-stuffed with stuff.
But while over-stuffed is not necessarily bad, under-shaped is.
Pascual is a tornado of talent. However, a tornado is an uncontrollable mass of unbridled force and neither of these features works well on a stage.
And here is the point when I find myself standing up from my desk, reaching up to the top shelf of my office where, from between my bust of Smedley Butler and Bill the Cat doll, I pluck down and dust off one of those Golden Adages I keep handy:
Always leave them wanting more.
This is Pascual’s first Fringe and she put her heart into the effort.
And her liver, and her anterior pulmonary plexus, and her gallbladder, and her inferior vena cava, and her sacral plexus, and her eyelashes, and her philtrum, and her…..
You get the idea.
What Pascual lacked was a constructive containment of the creative whirl that she is.
Had she had that, Herpes: A Love Story would have infected us all.
A BRONZE MEDAL.
♦ ♦ ♦
Herpes: A Love Story
Running During Fringe 2017 at
studio/stage (Main Space)
520 N. Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90004
Remaining Shows:
Friday, June 23, 2017 – 9:30 pm
For Tickets and Additional Information:
http://www.hff17.com/4504
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