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Who knew ‘trap cheese’ is the best cheese?

You know the economy is bad when even mice have taken to doing ads on podcasts in order to scrape by. But hey, that’s just the world we’re living in. Or I should say that’s the world of Mouse City Podcast, which is one of the shows participating in the sixth annual Denver Fringe Festival over at Hope Tank in Denver.

This show is a three-person production starring Frieda Dunkelberg as a scientist, Victor Longman as the city mouse, and Elizabeth Kirkmeyer as the country mouse. The show begins with Frieda as the scientist. They come out and tell us that this is a grand experiment that they are doing because they’re broke. They need a little extra cheddar—pun intended—so they have decided to do this experiment in which they’ll translate what two mice are saying into English so that we can hear them and then make them host a podcast designed for human consumption.

So that’s the central premise of this wildly innovative, insanely wacky, very adult, raunchy show about what happens if you give a mouse a microphone.

The show itself is about 45 minutes in length, and it is just wildly varied in terms of what is being presented on stage. You have everything from the mice doing ads about trap cheese, which is one of their favorite snacks, to breaking down “mouse-ioms,” which are like idioms, but for mice.

There’s a ton of audience interaction. They bring two audience members up on stage at one point so that the city mouse can demonstrate his course on how to get his sacred trap cheese. His advice? Just send your buddy to go first so that if they die, at least you get away clean. It’s stuff like that, which is completely irreverent, that makes for such a fun time.

The lead performers — Elizabeth and Victor — have incredible energy together. It’s clear that they’ve spent a lot of time developing this very specific back-and-forth dynamic, with Victor’s city mouse being very rambunctious and wild. He’s very much got a kind of Chad bro vibe, and he is absolutely off the hinges. Elizabeth’s country mouse focuses more on mouse family values and mouse supplements and things like that. It makes for a very funny contrast. They play cousins in this show with very different perspectives, which makes for excellent podcasting material.

The show itself is very tight, very fun, and absolutely doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s a strange, quirky show that feels like an insane little gem of a discovery. I’m going to be thinking about this show, its gags, and especially its very wild and over-the-top ending for days to come as I do the rest of my fringe festival rounds.

This show has two additional showtimes: Friday, June 6th and Saturday, June 7th at 8 p.m. So if you are still looking for shows to fill out your fringe schedule, I’d definitely recommend making a trip down to Mouse City Podcast to listen to a taping.

*Note: Over the next few days we’ll post as many mini reviews of Denver Fringe shows as we can.