UNLV previews play for Australian Fringe Festival

They're not on the fringe.

They're in the Fringe.

"We get huge turnouts of people throughout the city," says Timothy Jones, a music professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and a coordinator of UNLV's third annual trek to the Adelaide Fringe Festival in Adelaide, Australia. "We've already got reservations from four critics reviewing for different newspapers for our opening night there."

Before student performers throw another show on the barbie at the Feb. 27 through March 22 fest -- second in size and scope only to Scotland's Edinburgh Festival Fringe for a celebration of edgy, alternative arts -- they'll preview their Down Under-bound production, "Sin City '67 On the Air," at free performances at the Fifth Street School tonight and Friday.

"We've been involved with the Edinburgh festival, but they've been a little less accessible and Adelaide has been much friendlier to us," Jones says about the event that invites independent artists in multiple art forms from around the globe -- professional and otherwise -- to strut their on-the-fringe stuff. UNLV's College of Fine Arts dispatches a delegation that will incorporate theater, music, dance, art and even architecture students into the main production, as well as giving separate presentations spotlighting their own fields.

"The students are treated as if they're professionals," Jones says. "We don't go in with the expectation of it being treated as a student production, which is an educational experience for the students."

Following the previously presented "Sin City: The Vaudeville Years" and "Sin City: The Golden Years," this show is the capper of a trilogy penned by UNLV film professor Sean Clark, a veteran Los Angeles screenwriter/producer. Recalling a real-life blip in the history of television and Vegas, "Sin City '67 On the Air" is based on the very, very short-lived -- as in May to June of 1967 -- run of The United Network, created by millionaire Daniel Overmyer, which hit the air with only a single program: "The Las Vegas Show." Broadcast from the Hacienda Hotel, it was hosted by Bill Dana ("My name ... Jose Jimenez") and featured Pete Barbutti, Jo Anne Worley and Jack Sheldon among the company.

"It's a valentine to that era," says director Josh Penzell of the part-play, part-variety show of B-level acts. "The show failed and the network fell off the face of the planet and this is a fictional rethinking of what that last show might have been. It's a Dean Martin and the Golddiggers kind of thing. We have our host and the regulars and the guest star and the Vixens, which is like our own Golddiggers, and a band we call the Moonlighters. There's a lot of banter and joking, some of it rehearsed, some of it not."

Actors play to nonexistent cameras and theatergoers should brace for a bit of peppery persiflage, as a Don Rickles-type insult comic flings a few verbal hockey pucks. But for all the songs and shtick, "On the Air" is an on-camera/off-camera portrait of a TV show, revealing a story arc in moments when the program breaks for commercials, the cast and the stage manager aware that their show was built on the back of a crumbling network. Lending the production character dimension within the variety-show format was one of the director's concerns.

"It would be very easy to take a piece like this and say, 'OK, we're going to do sketches and the continuity is not important, we don't need to worry about relationships onstage because we just want everybody to have a good time,' " Penzell says. "But we've tried to make it look as if these people have been working together doing a live show, keeping those relationships tangible so there's a history there."

A play about performers on the fringe of show biz on a network on the fringe of television for a festival on the fringe of the arts.

Drawing -- they hope -- a mass audience.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.