Orlando Fringe Festival reviews: Toxic men, hugs and comic therapy
Today’s Orlando Fringe Festival reviews are of shows seen at previous festivals by the Sentinel reviewing team. They are: “Generic Male: Just What We Need, Another Show About Men,” “It’s Alive! Live,” “Jon Bennett: How I Learned to Hug,” “Josephine,” “Poems for God” and “Psych! A Diagnostic Stand-up Therapy Comedy Show.”
"Generic Male: Just What We Need, Another Show About Men" (Silver, 60 minutes) won the top Critics’ Choice Award, best show, in 2022.
Darren Stevenson and Ashley Jones of Push Physical Theatre combine playfulness, theater of the absurd, social commentary, strength and grace to create a mesmerizing look at nothing less than the patriarchy. But this is no rant; this is true art.
In various skits, the pair examine masculinity through movement - a dance with their hands down their sweatpants in some kind of macho posing gone askew, or a game of Russian roulette with a balloon that displays masculine competitiveness.
A soldier's life plays out as mime, with a haunting underscore. An artistic balancing act accompanies a father-son discussion, showing us one man affecting the next generation.
And it's all delightfully meta - the show starts with apologies to the audience for the toxic masculinity they will see. This is the type of inventive, thought-provoking, relevant art the Fringe was made for.
There’s something delightfully old-school Fringe about “It’s Alive! Live!” (Blue, 60 minutes) - a bizarro talk-show spoof that comes from Casey Berkery and pals, some of whom are fellow alumni of UCF’s student-led improv comedy program.
The premise: Berkery hosts a late-night talk show, assisted by Bennett Silverglate in the Ed McMahon role (yes, I’m dating myself with that reference). The guests, though, are all monsters in some form. At my viewing, during January’s Winter Mini-Fest, the trio on the couch were a delightfully droll baby vampire, a sewer rat and a French artist whose medium is dead bodies. If that wasn’t scary enough, he was also a mime - Quelle horreur!
Berkery is a congenial host presiding over the silliness - he might lean a little more into deadpan to create more contrast with his guests - and in a genius move, there’s funny recorded video (very well done by Abbigail Seneca) to flesh out the characters (so to speak). As with a real talk show, the banter is unscripted, and the players were adept at earning laughs from audience questions.
In his very funny one-man comedy, "Jon Bennett: How I Learned to Hug" (Orange, 60 minutes), the Fringe veteran uses his own romances to explain his aversion to and rediscovery of embracing. Bennett combines the tricks of the best storytellers: Details that are funny at face value (Emu airlines, named for Australia's only flightless bird), and a dollop of heart underneath the raunchier jokes.
He has the awkwardness of the adolescent male down perfectly with all the chaos puberty brings. His face lights up with the naive teenage pride of long ago when he recalls at age 18 having sex four times… in seven minutes.
"How I Learned to Hug" is a reminder that Bennett is the real deal - switching from barroom humor to heartstring-tugging emotion on the turn of a dime. In his "How I Learned to Hug," there's a lot to embrace.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the magnificent “Josephine” (Silver, 75 minutes) returns - and for the Fringe features a live band. This engaging and engrossing musical bio of chanteuse-activist-spy Josephine Baker, co-created by Michael Marinaccio, Tod Kimbro and Tymisha Harris, has deservedly won 25 awards across multiple continents.
Baker is best remembered for her scandalous "banana dance," but she was at one point the richest Black woman in the world.
Harris - named the Orlando Sentinel's top leading actress in a musical of 2017 for her performance - captures the many facets of Baker’s colorful life and skillfully ages before the audience's eyes without resorting to wigs or makeup. She brilliantly brings the shimmy, the sashay and a poignant sense that Baker's restless search for love stemmed from the sadness that her own country wouldn't accept her.
With gasp-worthy moments, Victoria Watson Sepejak tackles contemporary topics in "Poems for God" (Blue, 60 minutes). She opens her fast-paced show with a cute-little-kid lisp, sings a cute-little-kid tuneless song and bundles up like one of the "Peanuts" kids about to go skating. Don't be fooled: This kid more likely comes from "South Park."
The cuteness soon vanishes as Sepejak skates right to the edge to make her points: a "pedophile hunter" segment with a very committed audience volunteer left me uneasy; an interpretive dance with a bottle of body lotion - a riff on who do society's beauty standards for women actually benefit? - came to a climax that's seared in my brain. A very funny behind-the-scenes look at the opening musical number of "Beauty & the Beast" was safer ground: Why does that woman so desperately need six eggs?
But safe is not the point for Sepejak, who co-wrote the show with its director, Isaac Kessler. The most pointed, and searing, bit in her quest to "save all women" involves the Village of Aborted Babies. This is powerful, point-of-view stuff delivered full throttle on the knife edge of humor and horror.
Finally, "Psych: A Diagnostic Stand-up Therapy Comedy Show" (Yellow, 75 minutes) is, well, exactly what the title suggests. Therapist and podcaster Aimee LeCours has three comics do brief standup sets, and then she and the audience ask them questions. From that, she offers diagnoses of what might be affecting their mental health. She also stresses that these diagnoses aren't to be taken seriously as actual medical advice.
Gimmicky? Yes. Fun? Sure, if you enjoy seeing people's psyches probed for laughs. LeCours is an affable host, accurately describing herself as having "big guidance-counselor energy." Her stand-up pals during a press preview were all funny and game for the setup. A word-association game fell flat at my show's finale, but I did learn a new malady: Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
Orlando Fringe Festival
• Where: Shows at Loch Haven Park are in color-coded venues; off-campus locations are identified by name.
• When: May 12-25.
• Cost: $10 button required for ticketed shows, then individual performance tickets are no more than $15.
• Schedule, tickets, more info:OrlandoFringe.org
• More reviews:OrlandoSentinel.com/fringe
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This story was originally published May 9, 2026 at 6:20 AM.