Musical (Not!)

The Striding Lion Ensemble is coming to this year’s Boulder International Fringe Festival with a singular aim: to overturn the current concept of musical theater in favor of something more up to date. Company spokeswoman Amanda Berg Wilson explains: “We are an interdisciplinary company in Chicago of choreographers, theater artists and musicians, and we collaborated a few years ago on developing a piece with music that we recorded as a concept album, sort of a meditation on self-perception in a digital age and how we try to communicate ourselves to others online. For this show, we took the ten original rock songs we wrote and turned them into a live show. The result is not exactly a musical, although it most closely resembles a rock musical.”

That show, Birdsongs, opens tonight at 7 p.m. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 1750 13th Street, before continuing for four more performances through August 28. And it should rock: “We don’t use traditional choreography, and the book is collaboratively composed or, in some cases, actually directly lifted from online sources like Wikipedia,” Berg Wilson notes. “There are all these crazy forwarded e-mails and actual blogs that we imitated and borrowed from. Think of it as the next generation of musical theater.”

Tickets are $12 to $15 (or two-for-one tonight only), and group discounts are available at the door; for more information, visit www.boulderfringe.com.

Sun., Aug. 22, 7 p.m.; Mon., Aug. 23, 6 p.m.; Tue., Aug. 24, 9 p.m.; Fri., Aug. 27, 8:30 p.m.; Sat., Aug. 28, 5:30 p.m., 2010