Pomp and Circumstance

Even without having seen all 30 plus offerings of the San Francisco Fringe Festival, it would be hard to envision David Rouda not walking off with the Fringe laurels for the second year in a row.

Although the festival is staged on a level playing field, some entrants are just plain having fun: strutting, but definitely not fretting their hour upon the stage, while others are having fun at creating a theatrical piece that is really cutting edge yet ascribes to at least a few of the rudimentary tenets of quality theatre.

Rouda’s entry: POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE has two winning features: a clever, very witty, complex, airtight script and a superlative, highly capable cast.

While the Fringe Festival clearly means many things to many people, David Rouda interprets the Festival as an opportunity to showcase a work in progress that plausibly looks and feels like a finished product.

Some shows have such slow pacing that the show halts, lurches and drags until the audience develops a collective anxiety: a frustration like they are mentally trudging through the theatrical equivalent of the LaBrae Tar Pits.

On the other hand, the pacing of MR Rouda’s show is closer the Blipverts of MAX HEADROOM fame: the show clips along so fast and furious that the audience should be wearing seatbelts.

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE is a legal beagle show depicting two trials, one family and one law firm.

Philosophically, it asks the question, do we become who we pretend to be?

One pair of characters pretend to be the Bride and Groom from the SONG OF SOLOMON and the other pair pretends to be Othello and Iago.

One subplot involves an overdose of Viagra and the other involves a homicide; try to guess which is which.

The same father and son law firm represents both the Bride and Groom couple and Othello character, in the civil and criminal cases that ensue.

John Cornwell’s performance as Zach Ebersohn is high energy and right on the money: Zach is the ambitious heir apparent to Max Ebersohn’s established law practice.

Joe Madero as Max packs power into his delivery while sustaining a rapid-fire, Walter Winchell delivery that by necessity characterizes the entire production.

If the show is great, even with the limitations placed on it at the Fringe Festival, it can only be much better when it has the chance to decompress itself from under an hour, to its rightful running time of an hour and a half.

Look for it in a theater near you.
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Jeffrey R. Smith is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle.