Lyle Zimskind

The annual Hollywood Fringe Festival is back in its fourth edition, with around 200 shows running day and night in over 20 theater venues, all in one neighborhood, through the end of the month. The quality and content of the productions vary wildly, but tickets are cheap and it's fun to take your chances, throw caution to the wind and just go see whatever's playing at any given moment. That's how we do it, anyway. Here's how we've liked the six randomly selected shows we've made it to so far.

North Hollywood's bizarro institution ZJU is at it again with this highly charged, 50-minute blast of horror, an homage not only to the zombie movie genre, but also to the culture of the Valley itself.

Director Shirley Jo Finney's lively, warm-blooded production, with an excellent cast and intermittent choreography by Maria Bermudez, serves the play so well that its shortcomings are largely obscured.

LA Opera Managing Director Placido Domingo conducted the Puccini classic Toscaat the Music Center. And the LA Phil's fully staged Marriage of Figaro production at Disney Hall is the second piece in its Mozart/ DaPonte Trilogy project conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Over the next two weekends, Long Beach Opera will be spotlighting a very different side of Copeland's musical prowess with the US premiere of The Tell-Tale Heart, based on the popular E.A. Poe classic.

Ghost Road artistic director Katharine Noon's portrait of the latter-day Promethean creator as a psychologically tortured young woman benefits from a uniformly very good cast and stellar design work, but the diffuse narrative structure of the play itself, though--credited not to any author but rather to a workshop ensemble--is off-putting.

"La Cenerentola" is on exactly no one's list of great opera scores, but it really is pretty funny. Director Joan Font's production is not an argument for the work's reevaluation, but rather a demonstration of how a contemporary aesthetic can invigorate the latent charms of a bel canto.

No other opera provides a more accessible introduction to the heady musical dramas of Richard Wagner than his first mature composition, "The Flying Dutchman." And this new LA Opera production had a stormy backstage story line of its own on Opening Night.

We've had occasion before to marvel over the unique "Urban Death" theatrical enterprise that inhabits Zombie Joe's Underground in North Hollywood for a couple months every winter. If the current edition of "Urban Death" is less consistently scary than we've seen in the past, it's also funnier, grosser and more consciously theatrical. Plus there's a lot more sex.

Though immature humor has arguably assumed a slicker commercial veneer in our present Apatow-dominated era, and the original National Lampoon magazine is already 15 years out of business, it can still be fun occasionally to subject yourself to some old-school unregenerate comedy that's just downright inappropriate. And the new "Sketches From the National Lampoon" revue certainly fits that bill.