And now for something completely different, as the Monty Python guys used to say: Four Humors Theater, back for another year at the Cincinnati Fringe, brings a wholly different — and totally charming — piece for audiences of all ages, Bombus and Berrylinne.  

The mistakes Madeline made, which give title to this 75-minute excursion into wanton lack of bathing and job despair, are exactly those our heroine Edna adopts as her personal route to coming of age and meeting life on its own terms. A how-do-we-get-grown-up story seems appropriate for the annual intern project at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati (ETC), this year the work of five actors, directed by fellow intern Jenny Estill.   

In her director’s notes for The Doppelganger Cometh and Overtaketh, Leah Strasser says, “We hope you find this play as funny as we do, because we still laugh every time we hear it.” If that was the goal of Strasser, who also plays a central role, and her colleagues who have announced the birth of Homegrown Theater, a new local company, I’m afraid I need to say “Better luck next time.”  

The most engaging of the three dances presented by The Space/Movement Project in Kiss Kiss Missiles: A Retrospectacle is the first, with all five of the company’s dancers barefoot and wearing costumes that could almost have come out of their everyday closets with a sash or a ribbon added for the stage. A dancer wearing a flaring red skirt and dark top appears in movement as slim and supple as pulled taffy.   

Nothing, Nic Balthazar’s piece about bullying, makes it U.S. premiere as Unity Productions’ Fringe production, presented at Know Theatre. A one-man show, the multimedia play uses video and music to move the story forward. Nothing mixes forms and does it well: one part engrossing stage drama and one part, documentary.   

Radio drama was a distinct art form in the middle of the 20th century, and Tanya O’Debra’s Fringe show, Radio Star, evokes that evocative mode of storytelling, complete with sound effects, with a distinctly modern filter.   

Kevin J. Thornton tells stories from his life with great humor, constantly connecting with the audience and responding to their hilarity at his outlandish tales of gay life and adolescent sex. He breaks things up with musical interludes, playing his grandfather’s acoustic guitar with an electric pick-up and singing Pop tunes that illustrate or reflect some of his themes. (He opened the evening with Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”)  

A performance based on social activism isn’t in and of itself very fringy. Lots of artists till that field in their works. But when a performance ambitiously asks audiences to participate in social experiments and does so in a strangely uplifting way, well, that’s utterly Fringe.   

The Twilight Saga has already provided plenty of opportunities for parody, and the bare-bones performance outfit, Ornamental Messiah from Newport, adds another to the list with their 60-minute production of Third Quarter Moon.  

Love Knots, this year’s Fringe submission from Cincinnati’s Essex Theatre Arts Studio, has good, even sweet, intentions: five 10-minute plays by Phil Paradis, each trying to untangle love. The production’s weak writing and flat, uninspired staging sours the experience of a piece that should have been frothy, warm, and kind of tingly — day-old coffee when you wanted a latte. But an obviously talented cast brings to life a few tender and endearing moments.