By Rick Boettger

Billy Joel saw Vienna as an ideal place for a rich old age, and wrote a song about it–”Vienna Waits for You.”  70 Girls 70 at The Fringe Theater showed us that we in Key West are the Vienna of Billy Joel’s hopes for his father and, indeed, all of us.

This 70-minute play about a  dozen retired performers sharing a cheap hotel was the most baffling theater experience of my life.  How could I be so enrapt by a musical with not a single memorable song,**** a self-declared nonsensical “plot,” and only one of the characters developed at all?

Director Rebecca Tomlinson tipped us off in part of her welcoming pitch for donors.  Describing Fringe as a “bridge” for both young actors on the way up to our other well-established playhouses, and former northern career pros who somehow managed to retire in our Paradise, to keep their hand in.

So that explains all of the obvious talent willing to work for what I expect are modest wages!  This immensely complex play has so much precise staging, singing*, dancing**, timing, coordination, it again is much closer to Broadway than community theater.

High marks for the narrator couple, who with perfect clarity and diction introduce everything.  Best is their opening by admitting the play had great reviews on all but plot, a silly and convoluted fur-heisting scheme the hotel’s residents concoct to give them something to do.  We are warned not to try to keep things straight, but go with the narrators’ intros to each number.

Best for my attention span, they compress the “plot” so the whole thing is a fast-running 70 minutes.  Still time for me to get the high concept: this is about old people having fun.  The performers are old people having fun.  The entire audience is old people having fun.

Welcome to Vienna!  Key West is of course a hot town for the young, primo for all things seawater, wild bar drinking and music, and food for all ages–unlike St. Augustine, where a friend moved to and back again because “everyone was old.”  But we Golden Agers enjoy the free diving-spear fishing and super tennis as long as we can–I retired here at 48 just in time to learn the water, and play tennis close to my prime–and then we have created a differentially rich way to transition to new joys and challenges.

Hooray for The Fringe serving the full spectrum, from the fresh twenty-somethings in most of their plays I’ve seen all the way to 70 Girls 70.  They took a chance we would get it, this challenging musical.  I hope enough of us did.

*The most impressive song was like the show-off Tom Lehrer’s “Periodic Table” and “Lobachevsky,” but even harder.  The male singer*** didn’t miss a syllable about some nonsense on a showboard, slashing the stylus from one to another of twenty tabs while in full recitative.  I was able to sing Elements because I learned even the ones over 100 in three years as a PChem major at MIT (if nothing else) and my years of Russian allowed me to sing Dnepropetrovsk like a native.  This song had NO relation to any real world, and tip o’ my hat to the singer.

**Top dance honors go, perversely, to a young woman not even part of the cast, just sashaying across the stage twice as a stagehand delivering a cart of something, in Michael Jackson mesmerizing motion.  Makes me worry I’ve gone all DEI–my favorite singer was the only other black person, also a full sized woman.

***In a stylistic first, this footnote to a footnote is to divulge why I’m not naming any of the performers or songs: it is out of honor to the brilliant artistic director’s decision NOT to have a playbill listing the numbers and their performers.  I don’t have to understand a decision in order to bow to it.

****Oops, almost forgot: the songs were so restrained, the ladies refused to hit the money-notes, the high-C conclusion–twice, with the same last word, “be-LIEVE.”  Later, the single money note was by one of the few guys, which got the biggest round of applause, of course.

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