FringeNYC report: Day 7

One time-honored staple of the Fringe Festival is the sketch comedy show, and at first gloss, that is what the three funny women of Lipshtick (Venue 5, Dixon Place) intend to present. Opening with an ongoing Game Show segment—“The Make Me Over Show”—Romy Nordlinger, Scout Durwood, and Aja Houston, the “makeover specialists,” scope out the audience for a lucky contestant. The chosen winner (director, Bricken Sparacino) is eventually whisked backstage to undergo her transformation, while the makeover specialists change costumes and characters for each successive vignette. Each individual actor has a strong stage presence, and a shot at some pretty funny material, and the video montage (designed by Adam Burns) interspersed between each scene is almost too good, at times threatening to upstage the actors altogether. It’s a shame that the amount of deliberately unfunny material written into the show detracts from Lipshtick’s basic identity and exiles it into a kind of limbo where it cannot present itself as a serious drama, but doesn’t quite fulfill its premise as a sketch show either. On the other hand, characters like star-struck Macy’s shopgirl “Brittany” and unapologetically lusty bargirl “Dorca” are as funny as it gets. Read more