In the 2021 Covid-19 version of the annual Hollywood Fringe Festival, there are entries by theatre artists from such exotic places as Brazil, Australia, Canada, Pittsburgh and North Texas. However, these offerings are not being performed live in front of an audience in Hollywood. Instead, they are being presented only as Virtual Performances. The first I’ve viewed is from a community college in North Texas. It’s billed on the Fringe website as a “comic tour de farce,” but it has few laughs and is a fairly faithful adaptation, by Thom Talbott, of Alexandre Dumas (pere)’s classic adventure The Count of Monte Cristo.
Entitled The Erroneous Count of Monte Cristo, Talbott’s main tweak to the story is a gender reversal. After some pre-marital canoodling, Mercedes (Missy Embrey) puts on the clothes of her sailor lover Edmond Dantes and is immediately and mistakenly arrested for treason. After a sham hearing, she is sent off to prison in the Chateau D’If on an island off the coast of Marseille. Meanwhile the real Edmond (Justin Hinton) assumes the identity of Mercedes and, to prevent his penniless father from being thrown into the streets, marries his enemy, Mondego, and they adopt his father as their child. It’s a farce, folks. The main laughs here come from the fact that nobody seems to notice Edmond (really Mercedes) has a big bust while Mercedes (now Edmond) has a hairy flat chest. Somehow the Mondegos’s marriage survives 20 years of utter short-sightedness. In the meantime, Mercedes is instructed by a fellow prisoner, the Abbe (Hinton in a long gray beard) in how to be a proper gentleman and clues her in to the whereabouts of a secret treasure. The Abbe dies, Mercedes takes his place in the burial sack, finds the treasure and returns to Paris to seek revenge on his enemies.
Five talented actors play all the roles with tongues firmly planted in their cheeks. Austin Creswell seems to be having a lot of fun playing all of Dantes’s enemies (it’s all in the hats). Grace Dieter plays the other female roles. Talbott himself plays Edmond’s father and later a confederate of the Count. He and Creswell engage in a momentous horse race on inflatable steeds and there is also a doll or two involved in the shenanigans. Talbott also crisply directed the play which was probably filmed at the height of the pandemic since none of the actors appear in the same frame at the same time. It’s all artfully filmed by Devon Hacker.
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/7177