Fringe’s Game Show for Awful Children encourages kids to misbehave
Let's face it, kids can sometimes be devilish beasts.
The little ragamuffins have minds of their own, an occasional stealthy plotting behind the playfulness, their youthful insouciance and innocence a cover for something more diabolical. If not for the rigidity and rule-making of adults, who knows what children would do with unfettered freedom?
Well, children, your day has arrived: You can be as mischievous, as crazy, as silly, as disruptive as you choose. And if you particularly excel at being bad, then you will receive something good: You will be crowned “The Most Awful Child of the Day.”
Where can you engage in such antics? At the U.S. premiere of Marcel Lucont's “Les Enfants Terribles. A Gameshow for Awful Children.”
The hourlong show, which has enchanted European audiences while encouraging children to be naughty, will have five showings during the run of the Rochester Fringe Festival, which opens Sept. 10. Tickets are available online at rochesterfringe.com.
Lucont is the perfect emcee of the festivities. He exudes a certain French superiority, a willingness to try to shepherd the shenanigans of the children while remaining comically distant.
He is as much foil and foe as host, talking down to the children in a way that may not be completely foreign to them, while allowing them the space to display their wonderfully awful tendencies, or perhaps awfully wonderful tendencies.
The two comic sides
An admission here (perhaps children should stop reading, and I know there are maybe two of you who have made it this far): Marcel Lucont is a creation of Englishman Alexis Dubus, who is part French. You can find Lucont on YouTube with more adult-oriented performances (children, if still reading, those are not for you) as well as Dubus.
It was in 2003 when Dubus was hosting an alternative comedy night in England and he decided to perform as someone else. The sardonic Lucont took over, not in a Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation but a metamorphosis that allowed Dubus to sample the personalities of the French in a manner that both cherishes and chides.
“I find the French inherently hilarious,” Dubus said in a telephone conversation from his U.K. home. “... They'll insult you and you'll realize they insulted you two days later.”
Dubus/Lucont's stage presence is typically geared for adults, but he was dared by another comedian to create a game show, as Lucont, for children. “I was like, ‘There's no way I can do that.' ”
But he accepted the challenge and crafted a show in which children get to act out, even act as politicians, and reveal secrets about their parents. And the result has been wildly popular, declared “fresh, accessible and hilarious” by The Guardian.
“An absolute gem,” wrote the Edinburgh Festivals magazine. “If you don’t have kids, borrow someone else’s … a treat from beginning to end.”
Whereas adults may have imbibed an alcoholic beverage for his adult-oriented shows, Dubus has found that children can also be primed in advance.
“It’s kind of fun because children essentially are like being with a late-night drunken crowd,” he said. “But you can’t swear at them and you can’t slam them with a putdown — well, not too much. They’re unruly. They usually sugar it up to the max.
“They come in essentially wired from a different substance.”
The adult Lucont
Lucont’s visit to the Rochester Fringe will also include a show not for children: “Marcel Lucont’s Whine List”
This show will also be a U.S. premiere, a production that also grew from Dubus as Lucont emceeing at comedy clubs.
He channeled crowd work into a fullfledged act, in which the audience tells him of dreadful experiences, ranging from flubbed loves to overseas travels debacles to workplace failures. With humor, he then melds the sad sagas into what has been billed as a hilarious group therapy.
The show allows Dubus to return to improvisational roots, which is where his career first started in the late 1990s.
This 90-minute show for an 18-andover crowd will be available only on Sept. 14. All of Lucont’s shows will be at the downtown Spiegeltent.
You can reach Gary Craig at gcraig@rocheste.gannett.com.