Lyle Zimskind

A warmly anticipated L.A. theater event since its inception in 2010, the annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back up and in full swing with almost 275 shows running day and night in over 30 venues, most within walking distance of one another. Some of the offerings are great, some instantly forgettable. But tickets are cheap and it's fun to just take a chance on whatever sounds like it might be good. Last week we took a look at four shows we caught during previews. Here's a rundown of four more we saw the following weekend.

A warmly anticipated L.A. theater event since its inception in 2010, the annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back up and in full swing with almost 275 shows running day and night in over 30 venues, most within walking distance of one another. Everything from big-cast musicals to solo performances, full-length plays with intermissions to half-hour quickies, risqué raunch to family fare, high-tech productions to a "two planks and a passion" DIY approach finds its way into the mix. Some of the offerings are great, some instantly forgettable. But tickets are cheap and it's fun to just take a chance on whatever sounds like it might be good.

A few minutes into Bill Robens's ebulliently smart new comedy, Entropy, set in the thick of the US-Soviet Cold War space race, the Apollo-esque Zeus 3 rocket ship is launched into orbit. While we can see a trio of astronauts inside the spacecraft off to one side, the real spectacle in this moment is the hilariously realized, brilliantly low-tech center-stage simulation of the rocket's fiery blastoff, the separation of its modules, and the sparkly trail of fuel left in its wake. Directed by Christopher William Johnson, this spectacular production lampoons popular culture representations of the conflicts and achievements of the space age as much as it takes on the actual history of NASA and the US-Soviet battle for dominion over the cosmos.

Now receiving its Los Angeles premiere from the Road Theatre Company, this 2003 work by prolific playwright Wendy MacLeod (The House of Yes) evolves into a moving, but refreshingly unsentimental exploration of marriage, mortality and friendship.

We were completely bowled over the first time we experienced this under-an-hour-long series of short, wordless scenes and images of horror and intermittent macabre humor, and every few years we check back to see if the latest edition of Urban Death from creators Jana Wimer and Zombie Joe is still as unsettling as ever. It certainly is this time around.

Unlike the Phil's audacious one-off presentation in 2013, this Marriage of Figaro was built to last as a recurring repertory staple at the Chandler Pavilion. Director Ian Judge's staging plays up the comedy in the story, garnering almost as many laughs as the "Barber of Seville" we saw earlier this month, even though this is inherently a much darker, cynical piece.

Pure comedic entertainment from beginning to end, The Barber of Seville has a fairly straightforward plot, but a madcap, almost anarchic, sensibility. The current LA production, a Spanish-Portugese import, very enjoyably plays up the antics of the opera's heroes and the doltish malignity of its villains without running roughshod over the work's abundant musical charms.

Based on a true story, 'The English Bride; is about a young Israeli Arab's unsuccessful attempt to blow up an El Al flight from London by sneaking explosives into the luggage of his unsuspecting pregnant fiancee.

'Magna Cum Laude,' the opening sketch in Casey Smith's new one-man show at the Atwater Village Theatre, has nothing to do with graduation honors. But it sure sets an appropriate tone for the eleven bawdy scenes that follow it. Clocking in at just over an hour, At Some Point in the Process of the End of the World is a virtuoso performance of visual gags about human orifices and the things that go in and out of them, interspersed with a healthy dose of cartoon violence and other extreme, but very recognizable, signals of contemporary physical and cultural apocalypse.

Stephen Karam's em>Sons of the Prophet was a major off-Broadway success in 2012, earning rave reviews, winning major awards and finishing as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. When works of this pedigree come to Los Angeles, they usually end up in one of our larger institutional theater venues like the Taper, the Geffen or the Kirk Douglas. This play, though, has just opened at the tiny Blank Theatre Company space in Hollywood.