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missizzyIt would take Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue to lure me into a wooden “tent” structure cooled only by fans on a hot DC July weeknight; this is the third show by them I’ve seen at the Fringe. We didn’t see them last year, though, and I think since then they’ve had some personnel change, and maybe gotten a little tired, because I didn’t absolutely love their presentation of the Bronte siblings and their lives the way I had the first two shows I’d seen.
It was still good. They know how to be lively even in the heat, which they even made references to in the show, I enjoyed the music, with the occasional borrowed line or so from the Beatles, and they showed they certainly don’t stick to the usual fare; instead of doing the story of Jane Eyre, as one would expect, they combine a send-up of Wuthering Heights with a circus rendition of Anne Bronte’s life(with a joke they aren’t talking about her books because noone’s read them; when my mom indicated she was the only person the audience who had Anne actually ran over and hugged us for it!), and letting us learn about the existence of her and even of their brother Branwell, whom even I hadn’t heard of before, mostly because he never had anything published. In fact, more than anything else, they draw attention to how sad and short the lives of all four Brontes really were(though that resulted in one joke my parents didn’t get, since they didn’t know the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper”).
But the splitting of the show up into multiple stories I don’t think quite suited the style that way; in the end one was left with way too little of Charlotte, certainly, and a couple of the musical numbers ended up being repetitive of each other. I was left feeling there could have been more from it. Or maybe I was just overheated?
It was still good. They know how to be lively even in the heat, which they even made references to in the show, I enjoyed the music, with the occasional borrowed line or so from the Beatles, and they showed they certainly don’t stick to the usual fare; instead of doing the story of Jane Eyre, as one would expect, they combine a send-up of Wuthering Heights with a circus rendition of Anne Bronte’s life(with a joke they aren’t talking about her books because noone’s read them; when my mom indicated she was the only person the audience who had Anne actually ran over and hugged us for it!), and letting us learn about the existence of her and even of their brother Branwell, whom even I hadn’t heard of before, mostly because he never had anything published. In fact, more than anything else, they draw attention to how sad and short the lives of all four Brontes really were(though that resulted in one joke my parents didn’t get, since they didn’t know the song “Don’t Fear the Reaper”).
But the splitting of the show up into multiple stories I don’t think quite suited the style that way; in the end one was left with way too little of Charlotte, certainly, and a couple of the musical numbers ended up being repetitive of each other. I was left feeling there could have been more from it. Or maybe I was just overheated?
