Going Postal
Salvage Vanguard Theater, 2803 Manor Rd.www.hydeparktheatre.org
Final performances: Saturday, Feb. 2, 6pm; Sunday, Feb. 3, noon
Running time: 1 hr., 15 min.
I caught “How to Wear Your Backpack,” the piece that four-person troupe the Back Pack did for the first week of FronteraFest’s Short Fringe, and found the dance-based caper to be so fresh and inventive and well-performed that I was reminded of some of Little Stolen Moments’ greatest hits. “Wow,” thought I, chuckling at the clever antics, “that was great. What else do these guys do?” And so I looked forward to seeing what the recent transplants from Montana would do with a 75-minute Long Fringe show about “one lonely letter thrown into the world without a stamp or a return address.” Alas, Going Postal turned out to be not such an enjoyable experience, with memory of the quartet’s wordless Short Fringe wonder obliterated by a production so staggeringly twee and talky and riddled with cheap puns that I suppose its intended audience must be 6-year-olds for whom a typical episode of VeggieTales is insufficiently 1) risqué and 2) precious. Although mitigated in part by all-too-infrequent times during which the performers just shut up and danced – their impressive slo-mo gunfight sequence deserves to be rescued from its current context – this isn’t a show I can recommend.
This article appears in February 1 • 2013.