By Eric George Tauber
SAN DIEGO — I recently sat down with Jacob Surovsky, a delightfully talented and innovative young man whom I know from the Guild of Puppetry. Jacob is bringing his fifth show to the San Diego Fringe Festival, Apron Goldswift’s Alien Cabaret. Jacob grew up locally. His family attends Temple Beth El and he graduated from Canyon Crest Academy. He used to organize their scene for the annual Student Shakespeare Festival, which they won three years in a row. He is currently a junior at the University of Southern California majoring in Arts Technology and Business Innovation.
EGT: Tell me about your major.
JS: It’s this new school called the Iovine and Young Academy named after Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young or “Dr. Dre” because they were working on beats and they were trying to hire engineers and designers for their headphones and their software. And they couldn’t find people who did both. They couldn’t find engineers who understood how a designer thought and visa versa. And when they put them in the same room, they’d look at each other and just sort of growl and nothing would get done. So there was this gap in the industry of people who know how arts, tech and business all work together.
EGT: I can definitely see the need for that. Now tell me about the show you’re doing for the Fringe.
JS: So the show is called Apron Goldsmith’s Alien Cabaret. I had the idea for it a year to the date of last year’s Fringe. At the closing party, I was like, “What’s next?” People come to San Diego from all over the world to do a show. What if there were aliens?
EGT: So it becomes the Inter-planetary Fringe Festival. One day? You never know.
JS: Exactly. And it raises all these questions. How is the art in space judged? How does it matter? What makes art important? This is a culmination of all of that. It’s puppetry and music and comedy and drama. We put that all together in a weird weird weird show.
EGT: You’ve been with the Fringe almost since its inception. This is your fifth year and their sixth.
JS: I was an audience member the first year when it was three days long. …I’ve grown up with the Fringe. My relationship with criticism from the public and journalists has changed over time.
EGT: So how have you grown up with Fringe?
JS: I think just like learning a lot about creating, telling stories that I want to see on stage and exploring other ways of storytelling. I’ve seen puppetry and musicals and great dance and movement pieces. This show takes a lot of what I’ve observed over the years and puts it together. We have shadow puppetry, hand puppetry, large and small-scale marionettes. It’s all in there. We have musical numbers ranging from big dance number to intimate singer-songwriter pieces. Knowing how bold and risky performance art can get, let’s try to embody a little bit of that rather than another dark comedy. Let’s write sci-fi and make it joyful and celebratory rather than cynical. And then add in all of these elements and create a playground of a show that explores it all.
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Apron Goldswift’s Alien Cabaret is beaming down to the Lyceum Mainstage in the 6th annual San Diego Fringe Festival, which runs from June 21st to July 1st. For tickets and more information, go to www.sdfringe.org. To see a sample of Jacob Surovsky’s innovative puppetry, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0vVZ41qs08
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Tauber is a freelance writer specializing in the arts. He may be contacted via eric.tauber @sdjewishworld.com