Something's Gone Wrong in the Dreamhouse

The 1930s and its impact on today is dissected in a heady cocktail of bittersweet words and sharp beats, delivered with slices of Irish charm, humor and bawdy sing-along tunes.

It’s opening night of the Fringe Festival, and the nouveau-Beat cum Punk musical/poetry/spoken-word group Scream Blue Murmur is in from Northern Ireland. Maybe it was jet-lag. It’s impossible not to like these people — they are earnest and sincere in their displeasure at the human suffering caused by injustice, war, racism, cruelty and economic disparity. But there is something slightly “precious” in this collection of songs and spoken-word ragings “against the machine.” Even required audience participation in this multi-media hootenanny could not light their fuse or thaw a Minnesota audience’s reluctance to really get loose and participatory.