By Whitney Sorensen
If you’ve ever wanted to see a home movie, a Christian revival, and a pop star in a single performance, include The Eulogy on your list of must-see shows at the 2018 Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival. The Eulogy is the brainchild of Michael Burgos, who wrote the show, directs the show, and performs the show—he is the show.
The Eulogy centers on a group of characters (in every sense of the word) who have gathered to pay final tributes to the recently deceased Tomas, but you don’t have to worry that you’ll be attending a somber funeral. Burgos introduces levity during his introductory prelude, and from there, the laughs follow quickly one after the other.
Because the show is full of fun surprises, I don’t want to give away who the six funeral speakers are and how they know Tomas. The Eulogy is certainly absurd, but that’s the fun of it. If you think you know what’s coming next, wait two seconds, because Burgos is about to make a sharp turn in an entirely different direction.
Rather, I need to celebrate the performative skills of Burgos himself. He holds the attention of the audience for a full hour, and you can see the stamina required up close when you attend the show in a small space like those at the Fringe Festival. In Eulogy, he’s created a showcase for his physical comedy skills. He pantomimes, he dances, he forms contorted shapes with his limbs, and he truly embodies many different beings from moment to moment.
The dialogue Burgos delivers also shows great comedic finesse. The text feels like a hybrid of stand-up comedy, where one performer tells many seemingly unrelated stories to draw laughs from an audience, and improv, where unrelated elements are ultimately unified and the audience is allowed to participate in the creation process. Indeed, Burgos has a seasoned performer’s ability to go off-book and interact with his audience (literally every member of the audience) without disrupting the pace of the show or stumbling when he returns to the pre-written lines.
As someone who loves dialogue-heavy performance and is picky about what types of physical humor I’ll giggle at, I was surprised that my favorite sequence involved Burgos barely speaking a word. Rather, he conveys meaning with his body alone while an offstage voice prompts his funnier and funnier reactions.
I made sure to put this performance on my Fringe Festival schedule because it has a long list of awards from other theatre festivals. After attending it, I agree that those accolades are well-deserved. I also experienced a few moments during the show when I wasn’t quite sure why his bizarre characters had certain ticks or spoke certain lines, but these oddities always fit the tone of the show nonetheless. You’ll never attend a more light-hearted funeral than one hosted by Michael Burgos.
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Michael Burgos presents The Eulogy at the Great Salt Lake Fringe Festival
The Gateway, 110 S Rio Grande St, Salt Lake City, UT 84101
Remaining performances: Aug. 5 4:30 PM, Aug. 10 7:30 PM, Aug. 11 4:30 PM, Aug. 12 6:00 PM
The fee to get into the Festival is $5 and the show ticket is $10. All ticket sales go directly to artist. Tickets can be found at http://www.greatsaltlakefringe.org/tickets/
The Eulogy website
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