Sideways Stories From Wayside School

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low | 8/1/09 • Before entering the theatre, my companion asked me to tell her about the books: I replied that, while I’d read them when I was a child, I sustained hardly any memory of them. So, truth be told, I can’t approach anything like an objective analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of this show: because my experience of seeing it was being hit by wave after wave of nostalgia as I went “Oh, yeah — I remember that!” What I can tell you is that it’s bright and colorful and fast-moving and has a ridiculously talented cast and that this could be the role that Courtney McLean was born to play.

(And also that, every Fringe, I tend to find one line or one moment that I find completely, irrationally, disproportionately hilarious. Thus, I have spent the intervening time resisting the urge to suddenly shriek “Ahh! Rattlesnakes!” and instead find myself bursting out into sudden fits of helpless giggling. I have no idea why I’m wired this way.)

Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theater critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theater troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.