by *** (out of 5)
I cannot tell you yet how well New Jersey translates to old Jersey, the British isle off the coast of France, or to the average festival-goer at Fringe in Edinburgh. What I can tell you is Billy McFarland and Mike Sorrentino achieved just enough worldwide infamy or pop cultural relevance that audiences should at least have a starting reference point for this two-hander sending up the strange-but-true series of events that found the “Fyre Festival” guy and “The Situation” from MTV’s Jersey Shore sharing a federal prison cell in New York after they were each sentenced within the same week of October 2018 for their separate fraud cases (McFarland for wire fraud for his festival that stranded would-be attendees without provisions on an island in The Bahamas; Sorrentino for tax evasion).
As this dude-bro duo, Gabby Bryan goes full Jersey (or rather, Staten Island) for her take on The Situation, while Jenny Gorelick takes on the role of McFarland, re-enacting but also fully re-imagining what their time as cellmates must have looked like. It’s all fun and games, so to speak, but some scenes are played too straight, and too many of the scene-ending blackout lines didn’t quite hit hard enough. On the bright side, though, there are jokes to be found here. The funniest moments the afternoon I saw them came when they were forced to improvise, or when they were on the verge of breaking character. Gorelick, in particular, impressed with her abilities to ad-lib laugh lines to solve problems during the production.
But precisely because they’re parodying ridiculous people in a ridiculous situation, this show deserves to go completely off the rails. Lean into the chaos, I say! Or as The Situation might say, you cannot triumph without more umph.
Billy and The Situation runs through Aug. 27 at PBH’s Free Fringe @ Legends, Upstairs
