A little love, please, for Trixie Little and her sidekick/nemesis/duet partner, the Evil Hate Monkey. We can say without fear of contradiction that Trixie is best and bendiest burlesque detective we know, and Evil is without a doubt her most simian lover/termentor. This Baltimore-based dynamic duo has plenty of local admirers thanks to their appearances at the Birchmere, Palace of Wonders, and elsewhere — and unlike Batman & Robin, they are refreshingly open about the forbidden lust that keeps them bound in each other’s spell.

Alas, The Super Secret Show, their entry in the Fringe Festival, has been saddled not just with a venue change, but with two truly execrable time slots, 5:30 today and noon on Saturday, before they get to wrap things up at a more appropriate hour (9 p.m.) on Sunday. In the plus column, their move to the Warehouse is a big improvement over the atmosphere-and-bathroom-free Scientarium. It's helps that at the Warehouse you can purchase quite reasonably the kind of adult beverages upon which the proper enjoyment of a show like this so heavily depends.

The Warehouse is fine place to shut out the light, and it's a good thing, too, because this show is frankly too debauched to be performed or seen in the daytime, while the vengeful sun o'erwatches us. There is a whisp of a plot concerning Trixie’s attempt to locate the nefarious thief who absconded with the golden pasties, but you won’t care: You’re there to admire Trixie’s well-toned, weirdly flexible, and unbelievably strong body as she wows you with her skill on trapeze and baton, and her impeccable taste in glow-in-the-dark lingerie.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes), the long-running signature show of Chicago’s the Neo-Futurists that we reviewed yesterday, requires each of its performers to be a hybrid of improv artist, actor, athlete, and polemicist. Notwishstanding the fact that the team currently performing the show in the Fringe Festival is 40% female, it also takes some serious balls.

Because although you can rest assured that if a “play” like “1/2 Naked Ninja Pudding Pie” fails to induce asphyxiation-threatening laughter, the problem is yours, not theirs, the Futurists are no mere jokesters. (Each of the show’s segments is a “play” in Neo-Futurist parlance, though they’re seldom longer than a Ramones song.) Several of the plays on the ever-changing menu they’ve brought for their DC run include sharp-elbowed criticism of the Bush administration. But one of them – “26,558” – is literally a showstopper.

For two endless minutes, the five performers flip pages like Dylan in the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” video, each page bearing the name of a soldier horribly wounded in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion. The actors recite descriptions of some of the injuries. Needless to say, it’s serious as the grave. It ends with the papers littering the stage, where they stay for the rest of the show.

On Wednesday night, the first of eight local performances was a textbook example of the risks inherent in an unpredictably-sequenced show like this. “26,558” came up seventh in the linep, which meant the soldiers’ names were on the floor for the next 20 plays. The closer turned out to be “Honestly,” wherein the audience fires off yes-or-no questions at one of the actors and is promised a sincere reply. Sharon Greene, who also happens to be the Neo-Futurists’ artistic director, was the interogee that night. The first few questions were softballs, and why not? The show had rocked. They had us.

The phrase “review-proof” usually denotes some property so universally recognizable and demonstrably saleable that no amount of critical huffing and puffing can possibly derail its commercial invincibility.

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is something else. Yeah, it’s an established property, at least in Chicago, homebase of its creators, the Neo-Futurists. (Think the Groundlings, except less obsessed with getting on Saturday Night Live.) The hometown show has been up and running for at least three shows a week, 50 weeks a year, for 19 years. In 2003, the great public radio show This American Life devoted an entire episode to them, sort of. All this success may beg, for some, the question of whether the Neo-Futurists belong in the Fringe Festival. Based on their unconventional approach to pretty much every aspect of live performance, we’ll just answer with an emphatic “Hells, yeah!” and leave the hand-wringing to others.

But where were we? Ah, yes: “review-proof.” It is. Because if you attend any of the seven remaining performances in the run — which you absofreakingtively should — the show you see will be at least mostly, and possibly completely, different from the one I saw Wednesday night. That’s how these pioneering meta-nerds roll.

If the Capital Fringe Festival had a jury prize for Best Production, Indigo, A Blues Opera would likely be a top contender. Karma Mayet Johnson, a central player in the choreo-drama, wrote, directed, and produced the piece in collaboration with members of the cast and design team. Well-executed music, dance, and impressionistic movement augment a powerful script with deep emotional themes. The result is a lyrical and poetic portrayal of two women’s struggle to attain physical and emotional freedoms that many of us take for granted.

This staging of Indigo is a condensed version of a full length opera. Set in the antebellum South, the story revolves around two slaves, LizaSue, played by Johnson, and Bell, played by Ashley Brockington. They run into each other and their mutual attraction is palpable. The two women find themselves falling in love and willing to go to any length to escape their circumstance. Bell, having tasted freedom up north, is the more worldly of the two and the driving force behind the enlightenment LizaSue experiences over the course of the play. We see the world through LizaSue’s eyes and it is her character that develops the emotional resonance of the piece.

Photo by Torkwase Dyson

Composer/conductor Armando Bayolo tried to go through the usual channels in order to form the chamber ensemble he envisioned. Gathering paperwork and networking was unsuccessful, so he turned to every musician’s best friend, Craigslist. The call led to seven area musicians coming together to form the core of what would become Great Noise Ensemble (GNE). The initial plan was to have a small ensemble, but there was enough interest in the group that after some extra recruiting efforts, GNE grew to its present lineup of eighteen instrumentalists and two singers. Tonight, this new music ensemble will begin its third performance season at the Capital Fringe Festival.

Bayolo, a visiting professor at Hamilton College, sees himself as an advocate of new music and it was a dream of his to start an ensemble that could present cutting edge, contemporary classical music. “In my still young career I have known a lot of composers whose music deserves to be heard, but who still cannot get many performances, no matter how hard they work," he said. "Starting a new music group, for me, is a way to do something for these people whose music I value.”

The basic criterion the ensemble uses in determining what constitutes “new music” is that the pieces in its repertoire, for the most part, were written after 1970. An increasing number of pieces are developed in-house because several GNE members, in addition to Bayolo, are composers themselves. Bayolo, as musical director, has final say on the pieces chosen, but musical diversity is one of his goals.

“I don't believe in a kind of monolithic new music. The biggest underlying trait of contemporary music is its plurality. A new music group should reflect that and I think that, so far, GNE has been successful in doing so.” To that end, a typical concert will juxtapose challenging pieces, which are not for the faint of heart, along side more accessible works and even the occasional pop tune.

Photo from Great Noise Ensemble's web site

Kristin Cantwell, the solo performer in the cabaret show Butter: A Love Story, proves an affable host for the evening. Taking on the persona of a Paula-Deen-heavy amalgam of Food Network personality types, she introduces us to the wonders of the butter bacon burger, the importance of creating a mood with "roombiance," and the assets of Taylor the Latte Boy, who services her at Starbucks.

If only the girl could sing.

Cantwell has assembled an appealing collection of cabaret standards related to food, from the seductive "Peel Me A Grape," the hilarious "Fifteen Pounds (Away From My Love)" and the worshipful "Sarah Lee." Many songs fall outside her vocal range, and even when they don't, Cantwell tends to gravitate between shouting, an uncontrolled vibrato, and falling just flat or short from pitch.

It's a shame, as Cantwell is such a likeable performer; you want her to hit her notes and captivate her audience, but the vocals just aren't there. The show also has an undeniably positive message of embracing your curves and loving yourself, while still poking fun at those given to dietary excess. The highlights of Butter are her enthusiastic, sometimes self-deprecating musings between songs. Unfortunately, a cabaret can't survive on segues alone.

Butter: A Love Story's remaining performances are Thursday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 8:30 p.m. at Warehouse Beyond. Tickets are available online.

This playful, irreverent melodrama, a splendid performance of the 2007 Capital Fringe Festival, is a presentation of Solas Nua, the nonprofit dedicated to presenting the contemporary works of Irish artists to better acquaint the District with modern culture of the Emerald Isle. Tom Murphy, the play’s celebrated playwright, has created this modern adaptation to reflect Irish politics of the Land League and tenants rights. As you might imagine, The Drunkard is fraught with Irish stereotypes, but its vernacular wit and vaudevillian roots come together to form a good ol’ fashioned story of justice served.

The Drunkard’s whimsical guitar and fiddle intro hints at the lyrical performance to follow. The narrative follows the playful mishaps, the nightly binges, and the triumphant luck of the lovable hero Edward Kilcullen (Patrick Bussink). It chases Edward through many years, beginning with the news of his father’s death and of his disinheritance of his father’s fortune – real estate holdings in a small, quaint village. He’s down and out, and up ahead, the road does not seem too green. But even with the evil plot of the miserly lawyer McGinty and his taste for brandy working against him, Edward comes out on top.

You’ve got to know you’re tempting fate when you decide to call the show you’re staging as part of a festival of more than a hundred, Other Plans. The name sure ain’t sexy, but at least it’s descriptive: This anthology of one-act plays, written by Stephanie Alice Scarpinato and directed by Ty Hallmark, isn’t a total loss, but it’s hardly essential.

Of the four pieces here, three could use another rewrite while the other, And the Meek Shall Inherit, ought to be shelved entirely. Set in a hospital room, Meek concerns two sisters’ squabble over the ownership of a rosary. Bad news: It’s first in the lineup. Good news: It’s the shortest. Note to the stage manager: While we’re all for suspension of disbelief, a show that uses a rosary as its MacGuffin probably ought to have, you know, a rosary as a prop instead of just a set of beads on a string. When a "rosary" doesn't have a cross on the end ot it, you notice. We’re just sayin.’

Next up is Hungry No More, a study of a none-too-bright young woman who settles in at a diner booth to get to work at her ethically dubious new job as a ghostwriter. It's too long by a third and the story goes nowhere after it offers up, quite early, its one meager surprise. But Melissa Schick (as the writer) and Sheri Ratick Stroud (as a waitress driven to distraction by the girl’s yapping), manage to imbue it with some life.

“If I do my job as an actor, you won't notice that I'm South Asian or that I'm a woman, or even that I'm playing one of the most controversial political figures of all time. I'm portraying a person at a crossroads struggling with a difficult decision.” So says Zehra Fazal (pictured right) of her striking portrayal of Adolf Hitler in her self-produced, one-woman adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s play, My Friend Hitler, currently running at the Capital Fringe Festival.

Fazal has been in the D.C. area for nearly two years, working with companies such as The Bay Theatre, Scena Theatre, Landless, American Music Stage, and Mystery Dinner Playhouse.

The 22-year-old actor, a winner of the Wellesley College Fisk Performance Prize for Acting, spent the summer of 2004 studying with Japan’s Takarazuka Revue Company, an all-female musical theater company. She chose this play, her first solo performance, in part because of her attraction to Japanese theater. “In Japanese theater it is stylistically acceptable to transcend lines of gender and race. It's the ultimate freedom for an actor.”

Originally written as a four person show in three acts, Fazal had to make some difficult editing decisions in assembling her adaptation. “There's a lot I had to cut and edit out to make the solo show understandable. Sadly, I had to cut out a lot of the beautiful passages of text which are most representative of Mishima's style, but hopefully, that spirit is still present in the text I decided to use.” She communicated with the original translator, Hiroaki Sato, so that made the process somewhat easier.

Image courtesy of Zehra Fazal

Night of the Living Theater...by Dead Playwrights largely presents exactly what you'd expect to happen if notable writers from the ages were asked to take their scripts to modern-day producers and pitch them for Hollywood treatment. But while the five works highlighted in the piece may frequently lack surprises, the work as a whole still adds up to enjoyable, briefly-diverting entertainment.

The best of the short skits is "A Lot of Talking", which smartly echoes the themes conveyed in Waiting for Godot as two theater agents discuss how a writer they're scouting might just be Quentin Tarantino's next great ironic star. Also enjoyable is "Oedipus and Ovitz", with Stefan Aleksander offering a grizzly portrayal of the famed agent, and Tony Greenberg bumbling through modern life as the blinded Oedipus; it's not hard to see how the bare themes of greek tragedy, from incest to betrayal, might play out in an HBO series or studio blockbuster. "Hamlet #44" is a rather erratic take on what would happen if Madonna (Monalisa Arias) commissioned the Bard (Aleksander again, in fine form) to help make her a movie star, but the laughs outweigh the groans.

Less successful are "Paradise, Lost?", a repetitive piece which goes on too long and mostly retreads themes already brought up in the previous pieces, and "The Conjurer Meets the Devil", which builds an entire short play on one gag — Mel Gibson is Catholic and sadistic — which runs out of steam quickly. The celebrity impersonations can also be problematic - neither Greenberg as Mel Gibson nor Arias as Madonna seem anything like their real-life counterparts (though Arias is charismatic enough that it doesn't matter so much). The fault may also lie in the fact that the superstars are written as inconsistent caricatures.

Overall, Night of the Living Theatre has a cute concept, and enough funny moments to recommend it. If at times it feels unpolished, it's easy enough to shrug it off as part of the spirit of Fringe. Its final performance is this evening, at the Goethe Institute. Tickets are available online.

This Digital Life: Basic Instructions for Coping with the 21st Century, a presentation by Truffle Pigs as part of the Capital Fringe Festival, points at the strange role the Internet can play in our daily lives. In a wired world where artificial identities are easy to acquire and where people ironically sit alone in front of their computer screens trying to connect with people, this play draws attention to how endless access to information leads quickly to misinformation.

The story follows three sets of people whose lives are similarly entrenched in the technological domain. It opens with none other than a masturbation scene; isn’t that what the Web is best known for? This first scene does a good job of portraying a man in the dark rabbit hole of addictive digital stimulation, but is full of awkward shifts. Next, we are introduced to two teenagers who spend all their time creating derivative videos to post on YouTube. They long for the love of the unknown public, but ultimately begin to question the quality of the audience that watches the fruits of their immature labors. The two YouTube obsessed boys go through all the classics – the wonders of Diet Coke and Mentos, the Hampster Dance, DDR, and many others – but they fail to create anything original.

The play ends with a young couple expecting a child. Joseph (the character is named after the playwright) is set on using technology to make his unborn child’s life as easy as possible. He buys all the Baby Einsteins and he uses Baby Names 2.0 to eliminate any possible names that have rented domains. But his fiancée Victoria reveals a sad secret about their baby that simply cannot be helped by ones and zeros, showing just where technology falls short.

Puppets. Off-color humor. Off-color humor involving puppets. What could go wrong?

Well, plenty, if BurleyQ is any indication.

This exhaustingly awful entrant into the Capital Fringe Festival may appear to have a wacky, whimsical premise, but instead is the kind of show where you find yourself digging your nails into the knee of your theatergoing companion, eagerly waiting for the 50 minutes to pass. Think painfully bad jokes, laughably poor production value, frequently off-key singing, mediocre-at-best puppetry, leads with a complete absence of stage presence, and an air of self-congratulatory "edginess" that never lives up to its pretensions.

BurleyQ has one good gag -- a puppet that strips. But this underwhelming climax is hardly worth the flubbed lines and pathetic attempts at humor that bring us to this point. The fact that someone's gay isn't inherently funny. Neither is the fact that a woman loves gin. Racial stereotypes aren't automatically daring, either. BurleyQ's Professor Kipley and Buttons Stafford open and close their cabaret-style performance with the grating, "It's Cheap, But It Always Works." Well, they're right about the former.

Get your inappropriate puppet fix when AvenueQ makes its way to the National later this year, and steer clear of its cringe-worthy copycat. If you'd rather not heed our advice, remaining shows are at Friday at 7, Saturday at 6:30 and Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Warehouse Next Door. Tickets are available online.

Broad Gauge Entertainment is a non-profit arts organization dedicated to "fostering diverse perspectives in the arts." In today's local arts community, it stands as one of the few modes of artistic expression for South Asian voices. Outside of its traditional art forms, the desi community has been largely unrecognized, or perhaps even absent, from the D.C. art scene. Broad Gauge and other groups such as Subcontinental Drift might indicate a sea change of sorts.

A driving force of Broad Gauge is founder Arpita Mukherjee, a talented young director and writer who has put on shows at the South Asian Literary and Theater Arts Festival, the Schlesinger Center, and Flashpoint. Broad Gauge is currently staging two shows directed by Mukherjee, Death Before Dying and I Am S.A.A.M. (South Asian American Male), at the Capital Fringe Festival. The shows have flaws in their execution, but present a fresh addition to the the local arts community.

I Am S.A.A.M. (South Asian American Male) is a multi-media presentation of short vignettes designed to describe the travails of South Asian men in our nation's capital. Some of the scenes rely heavily on nudges and winks that only South Asians will understand, but most of the play is accessible to a wider audience. The cast is comprised mainly of amateur actors, but the women of the troupe, Carol Jacob in particular, have a surprisingly natural stage presence.

Image courtesy of Broad Gauge Entertainment

When you find yourself cupping the balls of a bull, you know your life has taken a turn for the weird.

At least, that's what Stephanie Garibaldi found after spending time in a Mayan village, just after deciding Ivy League College was not for her. Garibaldi's is one of four stories involving faith and self-discovery showcased in Chocolate Jesus.

The work is performed by regulars from SpeakeasyDC, a monthly storytelling night featuring seasoned regulars and first-time open mic participants. While those evenings can be hit or miss affairs, these folks have clearly honed their material and delivery for Chocolate Jesus. The stories are reportedly all true, and never lose our interest.

Garibaldi's tale is the hardest to swallow, but she sells it with self-deprecating flair. Amy Saidman, who tells how she got from the world's strangest Jewish summer camp to becoming an ineffective State Department protester, has a meandering delivery that still commands attention. Travis Wright's monologue is easily the most moving, a genuine retelling of what happens when an active Southern Baptist realizes there's a little more behind his love of Dolly Parton and fishnets, which reaches its climax when Wright has to come out to his conservative mother. But this is no mere sob story; Wright's opening anecdote of an eight year old's laughable misdiagnosis of Toxic Shock Syndrome, as well as his talents in the unorthodox hobby of clogging, balance out the heartbreaking moments. And Eva Salvetti is the group's best storyteller, introducing us to her wacky Argentinian childhood and Catholicism as an unlikely source for childhood rebellion.

They're just stories -- this is not a Fringe piece driven by carefully crafted dialogue -- but that's precisely what appeals about Chocolate Jesus, a piece that tackles big themes and life-shaping moments with plainspoken humor rather than showy spectacle.

Catch Chocolate Jesus July 20, 26, and 27 at 8 p.m. or July 28 at 10 p.m. at Playbill Cafe. Tickets can be secured through the Fringe Festival Web site.