Anyone considering taking in a Fringe Festival show ^[1] should start with “The Adams Conglomerate High School Drama Club Presents: Tales of the 8th Grade!” ^[2]. Yes, the title is somewhat unwieldy, but your face will hurt from laughing — I saw it last night, and it is BRILLIANT, particularly the guys playing Troy and Ghost Kelsey. Hee.
A bit of background: Tara Ariano wrote “The Bad Teen Novel,” ^[3] which you should read in addition to seeing the play, because it too is brilliant in the way that only middle-school purple prose can be. (My own BTN, set in a stable, is lost to history. Thank God.) Then Brad Akin adapted the BTN as a musical, and so you’ve got the hilariously bad thirteen-year-old prose, AND you’ve got a bunch of actors pretending to be bad actors, looking at their feet for marks, messing up cues, chewing the scenery, singing off-key…it’s so many layers of bad that it’s probably the best play I’ve ever seen. Clever, funny, the costumes are awesome, I can’t say enough good things about it. Well done, Akin & Co.
Anyway. Best $15 you’ll spend. Go see it.