BY LINDSAY HARRIS-FRIEL FRINGE CORRESPONDENT If comedy and rock and roll are your drugs, this show is the hard stuff. As you enter the cozy venue upstairs at O’Neals, earplugs are available for your use, but you won’t need them. Though Felon Fiercely is backed with a full PA, using a Fender strat, a bass, a drum set, and the power of three vocalists, their musicianship and sound design are careful enough that you’ll be blown away by the content, not the volume. John Felon and Joe Fiercely are a couple of miscreant musicians who have been sentenced to the worst torture Satan can inflict on them: endure an eternal open-mic. The Dark Lord effects his puppets via the most mundane of open-mic torture devices; a shaker egg, by which he intermittently possesses its bearer. This results in the position of antagonist shifting throughout the course of the show, but it never confuses, only shifts the stakes of the hilarious and compelling narrative. The creator-performers, John DiFelice and Joe Quirk have served mightily in the trenches of comedy and theatre, most notably with The Waitstaff, and for Plays and Players and The Delaware Shakespeare Festival. This study of Hell and playing in rock bands isn’t an attempt to lampoon mortality, sin and virtue, but what we choose to think about these concepts, and how we act on them. If you’re a lapsed Catholic, an exhausted English Lit student, or both, this show is for you. They explore every attempt at explaining the intricacies of human torture and pleasure, from Samuel Beckett and James Joyce to the solo death of Michael Hutchence. If you just love great music and have a very dirty mind, this show is for you, with contagious songs played brilliantly by DiFelice, Quirk, bassist Jay Ronca, drummer Jason Mowry, and warm, lovely vocalist Deena Frankel. Make sure you get a cold drink from the bartender, because you’ll need it to soothe your palms from clapping.
Felon Fiercely’s Open Mic Night In Hell