Hollywood Fringe 2017
Bono and The Edge Waiting for Godomino’s
Richard Lucas
Venue: Sacred Fools Second Stage
Festival: Hollywood Fringe
Low Down
A Beckett parody featuring U2 and pizza at front and center.
Review
In one of the silliest mash-ups to hit the Hollywood Fringe this year, U2’s star frontmen wait desperately for the arrival of a Godomino’s pizza. After a lifetime of living as a rock legend, Bono hopes that meeting an ordinary pizza delivery person will help put him back in touch with the common man. The Edge is just hungry. This is not the first parody of Beckett’s “Waiting For Godot” I’ve ever seen, but it may be the last because I’m not sure it can get any better than this.
Writer and director Richard Lucas plays Bono, a man whose fame and fortune has left him in an existential malaise. As he waits impatiently for his pizza to arrive, he also keeps his bandmate The Edge, played by Curt Collier, from sating his own hunger by eating a turnip. Collier is downright sweet as the childlike and edgeless Edge (whimpering such pitiful lines as “This castle is the only place where I know the pizza is not”) and playing excellent counterpoint to Lucas’s deep-feeling and shallow-thinking Bono. The two make a great pair. Bruno Oliver barnstorms the stage as the nearly-philosophical Domingo, challenging the minds of our heroes with his cryptic logic. Jeff Blumberg as Lucky, Domingo’s unlucky, rope-tethered servant makes able use of his expressive eyes as he spouts his own babbling nonsense.
After an all-too-brief run during “Serial Killers,” Sacred Fools Theater’s on-going late-night theater competition, “Bono and The Edge Waiting For Godomino’s” finally gets the platform in deserves. If you like absurd silliness, treat yourself to this gem of a show. But do not watch this show hungry, otherwise the existential suffering Bono and The Edge endure as they yearn for the pizza’s arrival will be your suffering as well. -ZACHARY BERNSTEIN
