And then. And then I saw Allegra Lingo’s “Crecendo,” and my friends, it was a delight. It’s news to no one that the woman is talented, but any performer who can circle an arena stage for an hour and hold an audience totally breathless has my undying admiration. She was funny and touching and her language was gorgeous and the story she told was beautiful and real and gentle without being sentimental, and her ability to weave her show into and around Aaron Copeland’s scores was fantastic—it seems an unlikely thing to attempt, but it worked, and God it was good.

The show is, in part, a beautiful, often hilarious soliloquy on the way art gets made and the way the artistic process mirrors life, a subject that can fall totally on its self-referential face in the wrong hands, but one that here is completely absorbing and insightful and inspiring.

Lingo takes huge raw talent and turns it to gold in her writing and performance alike, never letting up on craft for a minute, never getting sloppy, never resting on her considerable experience just because she can, and she takes the audience on a marvelous and unexpected trip we never could have imagined taking on our own. In this show, I saw the kind of wonderful artistic freedom to explore and imagine and create that’s allowed by the Fringe.

Marya Hornbacher’s full article on talent and the Fringe can be found here.