Barely Living

Shelby Bond – MTYP Mainstage

The premise here had so much potential but so much of it wasn’t delivered.

The characters are human survivors trapped after a zombie apocalypse—and the audience members are the zombies! This could have been hilarious, but they didn’t make nearly enough use of the audience. They traveled up the same aisle a few times, but they could really have exploited the hams in the crowd.

As far as the plot goes, there were a lot of moments that dragged on and on, like a zombie dragging a broken leg in pursuit of warm brains. The execution was adequate, bordering on poor.

This is their third performance of the show in this year’s Fringe; and by now they should not have microphone problems. There were also a lot of dialogue problems, enough where it started to feel like improv. I understand that there will be issues when you recruit an audience member to be a made-up zombie, but you should not have those same issues among your own actors.

And the singing! Jeez! There were moments when these actors showed that they could actually sing, but through most of their songs, they sounded little better than karaoke night.

This was a show that could have been so much fun. Instead, it was unnecessarily hammed up, poorly prepared, and not that funny.

Ray Yuen