Mr. Fox

‘Mr. Fox’ – Chipped Paint Productions
By Elizabeth Maupin
ORLANDO SENTINEL THEATER CRITIC

Mr. Fox comes on strong, just like Radio Station 99.3, The Fox, or CFOX, where young Craig Lombardi is trying to get a job. Craig’s willing to do anything, so he winds up playing Mr. Fox, the station’s mascot, and the job is both his first big achievement and his introduction to the great, cruel world.

Greg Landucci, at the Fringe last year with the exhilarating Dishpig, once worked as a radio-station mascot, so I’m guessing there’s a lot of truth in Mr. Fox, which Landucci delivers with all the force of one of those hard-wired radio jocks.

Introducing each character with a big, laminated cue card, he races from a squeaky-voiced academic to a hard-guy mascot specialist and from the three rules of mascotting (“do not take the head off in public”) to the 13 important qualities of mascotting, which wind up, ominously, with “the ability to withstand high temperatures for long periods of time.”

There’s an aura of goofy innocence about Landucci, and so you always feel for him – when he finds that he’s the best Mr. Fox around (“That was excellent foxing, man,” a DJ tells him) and then when the fickle crowds turn. But this is also rock ‘n’ roll storytelling – high-energy, loud and lots of fun. Our Mickeys and Minnies could take a lesson here.