Harry Nilsson once sang that "one is the loneliest number," but you actually have a goodly amount of company if you're a 2011 Cincinnati Fringe Festival performer. Close to one-third of the acts included in the eighth annual Fringe, commencing this week, are solo performers. Here are some highlights.  

Playwright Fernando Dovalina says 'The Comfort of Anger' is a work in progress, and he's right. It's not there yet. There are big and important topics explored, some of them relatively unexplored, and Fringe is a good place to air them. But perhaps not all at once.  

Part of the fun of Fringe is the slapdash, on-the-fly sense of some productions. Often this is calculated, of course, a screen for serious theatrical smarts. But after several days of such fun and games, it's a pleasure to walk into a real theater with a generously furnished set waiting for action.  

Johnny, a 14-year-old boy from New Jersey, is bullied by his peers and taunted by his Glee Club teacher for being "a little light on your feet." He soon splits for New York City to escape from his miserable life and find something better — particularly people who will appreciate him.  

It seems simple enough and therefore not unique: two performers (husband and wife duo Abigail and Shaun Bengson), two mics, a handful of instruments and an otherwise bare stage. But until you factor in the two personalities, their talents and their collective life experiences, you don't realize what a long, strange trip you're on.  

Hanging somewhere in the theatrical ether, ripe as a preteen suicide in a colonial barn loft, is a hysterical musical parody of the Salem witch trials. This be not it.   

In a program statement e.E. Charlton-Trujillo, the director of local poet Rhonda Pettit's 'The Global Lovers,' has written: "I wanted to create a visually compelling, sensory bombastic performance that didn't pull punches." My ever reliable Webster's Dictionary defines "bombastic" as "given to bombast" and "bombast" as "pretentious inflated speech or writing." Bingo!   

"There's a lot of different ways to tell his story. Here's how I tell it." I felt like a kid again, sitting around a campfire with someone spinning scary stories, one on top of the other. That's what 'Harold' is all about, the third iteration of excellent Fringe shows from Four Humors Theater.  

There is no question that Serenity Fisher has a staggering amount of talent: She plays magnificently, sings well, writes smoothly in rhyme and coins clever inversions of phrases. But this is a poorly formed and indulgent exercise that, like a Stradivarius with only one string, plays the same light note throughout.   

The Cincy Fringe Festival is an appropriate venue to raise questions about how Cincinnati or any city is managed because a lot of the people watching are likely to be sympathetic. But I also want the Fringe performances I see to be entertaining or engaging, and I'm sorry to say that 'The Water Draft,' a work by veteran avant garde artists Michael Burnham (theater) and Barbara Wolf (film), failed to entertain or engage me.