REVIEWS: Half-Baked Boomer

Half-Baked Boomer is improv gone weird! Francine of Zazu Productions is lovely and inventive. She asks us to wait just outside her kitchen as she needs to finish baking a chocolate cake. Wafts of chocolate weave through the performance space adding to the sensory experience. Francine asks for audience participation and then riffs out on the suggestions. Her mind is wonderfully weird and creative. The places that she takes us are not where we expect her improvisations to go and I think that is a very good thing.

–BRIDGET M., PortFringe 2019 Review Team

If you love improv, you know you have to take the good with the its-not-working-so-good. So check this one out. One minute you are there laughing at the clever turn, the next with a smile pasted on your face. Second City, SNL, even Penn and Teller miss their mark and then can turn it around. It can be dangerous, fringe-cringe, revelatory and ultimately what makes live performance great. Take a chance with this Boomer. She will bake you up some nice confections, let you in on her half-baked ideas, and then win you over with heart and humor.

–LINDA SHARY, PortFringe 2019 Review Team


Half Baked Boomer presents a series of improv exercises launched by a ditzy matriarch character baking brownies for an extended family reunion. This device is accomplished with warmth and charm by Francine, a Tampa Bay performance artist. However, the audience was sparse for the 9pm slot on this cold, rainy weeknight which may have presented some challenges for the interactive format. Whatever the cause, the performer’s improv chops, on this night at least, were just a little half-baked.

–MARK SHAUGHNESSY, PortFringe 2019 Review Team

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