I expected this show to be laugh-out-loud funny, and it was funny. But, more than that, it was smart. Like really smart. The company and Cincy Fringe organizers didn't play up that aspect of the show. Might it scare off the masses?  

This 80-minute riff on an actual dinner engagement between the cigar-wielding Groucho Marx and the modernist poet T.S. Eliot deserves credit for its promising concept and daunting display of cultural erudition. But it falls short of its intriguing premise.  

The program establishes that the cast has developed a series of segments exploring the myth of being a young American in the present century. What's offered are stories you would expect from a collective of attractive college-age performers: the deaths of grandparents, the breakup of young-love relationships, acknowledgment of a parent’s wisdom, being made to look foolish in middle school.  

How many birds come out the egg ready to fly? This gleefully low-budget epic adventure by a London-based stage trio called Giant Bird looks like something newly hatched: even by Fringe standards, the show is cute in a scraggly, spindly way, the performers appealingly hungry and eager to test their wings.  

If you could play a guitar with a jackhammer, Ed Hamell would do it. As it is, he comes so close to "Abuse of an Instrument" that the music police would get him if he weren't searingly funny and, treating the language with no more respect than his guitar, profanely eloquent.  

Performance Gallery has contributed a show to every Cincinnati Fringe Festival; they're the only company that's been back six years in a row. But if you've seen one of their pieces, don't think you can bypass KAZ/m.  

This exploration of Hollywood movies includes almost completely new material from previous productions by Eagle to Squirrel Variety Hour. The concept fixes the performance to a degree and allows the discursive group to frame material in a more coherent and theatrical manner.  

Literary legend tells of an evening in June 1964 when Groucho Marx dined at the home of poet T.S. Eliot. The pairing seems unlikely, unless you consider that both men were famous for keeping their fans and followers guessing after the secret word.  

CCM acting professor k. Jenny Jones and 20 of her students have put together a good old-fashioned story, a multi-cultural re-imagining of the Everyman morality epic.   

Ed Hamell regularly tours his one-man show, Hamell on Trial, but has taken part in only one other Fringe Festival — the Edinburgh Fringe, where it was a solid hit.  

Choreographer-director Diana Ford blends song, dance, poetry, videotape, projected images and music in a 90-minute collage of sound and movement that examines problems in contemporary society. Five dancers and a poet participate live.  

  

This CCM-based dance theater collective presents stories and physical imagery that reflect what it means to be young and alive in the United States in 2009.  

Performance Gallery has assembled a script here with multiple characters and layered storylines to follow the reverberations and repercussions of a suicide and how it shreds the veneer of safe and effective communication.  

The uniqueness of Eagle to Squirrel Variety Hour resides in its combination of genres, including Electronic music, Hip Hop, Jazz and spoken word.