Results tagged “fringefestival”

Twisted. A twisted plot and twisted characters. Vile characters. Yale gender studies professor Darryl Lewis (Marisa Mickel) has been cheating on her husband, a less than successful academic, since before their 17 year old daughter Gwen (Natalia Emanuel) was born. Darryl's not so secret lover, Geoffrey Warshawski (Graham Stevens) is a renowned professor and longtime friend of the Lewises that shares her ultra leftist politics and arrives for the evening as a houseguest. But, as her cuckolded husband sleeps in their bedroom above, she doesn’t get any action from her libertine. That’s because G.W. is tired out from boning a fellow houseguest. So they fight instead. Then he beds the daughter. Who may actually be his. Did we mention this is a play about peace in the Middle East?

We know the Capital Fringe Festival can be overwhelming (and that our steady assault of reviews over the past few weeks can be, well, assaulting). So DCist's Fringe team decided to put together an easier to digest roundup of the shows we've reviewed so far as we enter into the final weekend of the festival.

Things weren't going so well for GL Mitchell, the hero of August Schulenburg's sharp, exceedingly odd and genuinely funny play, Riding the Bull, currently being presented by the Riot Actors of Washington as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. The unlikeliest of rodeo clowns, GL's a simple Catholic boy living in a small town in Texas who just wants his poor, crazy, Elvis-loving mother to be happy. But the guy doesn't really have a clue, and his penchant for the ladies of the Sears catalog have made him so randy he's actually lost his job and been ex-communicated from the Church. But everything starts to change when he hooks up with Lyza, the buxom town troublemaker. Thanks to some "magic" that seems to result from their oft-angry lovemaking, the two become wealthy overnight — and that's when it all predictably starts to go from bad to slightly better to much, much worse.

There's just something endearing about watching two earnest college a cappella groups vie to win the big competition, squabbling and smooching their way through school in the process.

Now here's some Christian rock we can get behind.

To be, or not to be. That is the . . . point?

If you’re a sucker for rainbow headscarves, insistent beats, and sequins, you’ll be instantly charmed by this enthusiastic Fringe Festival contribution from D.C.'s Ancient Rhythms Dance Company. The costumes are dazzling and the performers are all great showmen, though the choreography doesn’t always take advantage of the dancers' energy. When the narrator promises at the show’s opening to dive into “the transcendent and the mundane,” she delivers.

This year's Capital Fringe Festival includes three productions of new chamber operas by local composers. After Michael Oberhauser's Magnum Opus, reviewed last week, there is Life in Death, a new opera by Gregg Martin, a former graduate student at Catholic University. It is a one-act adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's 1850 short story The Oval Portrait, in which a story is uncovered about a disturbing portrait, painted obsessively by an artist infatuated with the image of his new wife, unaware that by locking her up for endless sittings he is killing her.

Everyone has those favorite records that simply demand to be listened to from start to finish, where almost every song is fantastic, each one an individual slice of near perfection that works even better within the whole of the album. John Morogiello's Irish Authors Held Hostage is the dramatic equivalent.

Somewhere amid the lunacy of Hiawatha Lopez's Murth, there runs a thin thread of logic. Maybe logic is the wrong word. Coherence. No, it's not that, either. Sense? I'm having trouble here, because while the play does have a plot that, against all odds, does end up tying itself together in the end, the entire thing is an illogical, incoherent, nonsensical exercise in batty wordplay. Imagine Tom Stoppard had written the Airplane movies on a bad mescaline trip, and you're getting the image. Unfortunately, unlike the Stoppard-esque heights of linguistic gymnastics to which it aspires, all of the puns, repurposed figures of speech, and tongue-twisting dialog fall flat.

It’s Not Easy Being Green presents a pleasant series of sketches about sustainability. Over the course of little over an hour, Green finds the right balance of humor and environmental messaging.

Immoral Combat takes place in and around a fast paced newsroom, but it is quickly apparent that the Fringe entry will be going nowhere fast. We follow the tribulations of the staff of Worldwide Broadcasting, a satire presumably of Voice of America, the federal broadcasting service and previous place of employment of the playwright, Rachael Bail. But the satire, a parody of Bail’s real life experiences as a journalist, offers few actual laughs. The short scenes cut in and out, every one punctuated by a full fade to black, aiming to impart a gravity to the story that’s not quite there.

"Stop the whining. Start stripping," reads the first post from dog & pony's blog documenting the development and rehearsals for Lorraine Ressegger's Bare Breasted Women Sword Fighting, currently running at Source as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. Reading the blog shows both the hang-ups felt by the actresses and the motivations for staging a show with the titular premise. The promise of skin and swordplay should be suitable impetus to attend, and patrons will be rewarded with just such brainless, if uneven entertainment.

Do you remember ads in old '60s comic books urging you to purchase a mail order monkey? The team behind does, and figured the premise was bizarre enough to build a musical around.

Sari to Skin is local actor/poet Neelam Patel's third solo show, currently running at the spartan Apothecary in this year's Capital Fringe Festival. The tastefully staged production is without a clear storyline. Rather, it is set as a series of biographical poems and monologues through which Patel communicates her struggles with her identity as someone who is "too Indian to be American, and too American to be Indian."

Those evil-natured robots, they’re programmed to destory us. But some of them want to evolve beyond their initial programming, like, say, a puny human raised in a dysfunctional family.

Eewwwwwwwwwww.

The title says it all -- well, maybe the "fabulous" is open to interpretation. Solo performer Brent Standstell set out to document his sexual adventures in the city as a young gay man. He proves an engaging host for the evening, and involves his audience as well, through methods such as an anonymous sex quiz (where's the weirdest place you've done it?) and vocabulary questions related to sexually-explicit terms (if you know what a "glory hole" is, you can get a pretty good feel of what the topics of the evening will be).

Are you a sucker for Trivia Night at your local bar? You might find yourself drawn to , playing the Warehouse Next Door as part of the Fringe Festival.

This year's Capital Fringe Festival features three chamber operas, including Michael Oberhauser's Magnum Opus, heard yesterday afternoon. This one-act chamber opera premiered in February, with a slightly different cast, at Catholic University's Benjamin T. Rome School of Music, where Oberhauser and most of the founders and performers of the small company Opera Alterna cut their teeth as students. The company's artistic director, Jay D. Brock, who directed the staging of this production, and several of the artists spoke about their work last week on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show.

Written by DCist contributor Monica Shores

All That Was Left of Them, which premiered last night at the Goethe Institute as part of the Fringe Festival, is a product of the Yellow Chair Theater Company of Wesleyan University. Despite all three actors and the rest of the crew being busy students or recent graduates of the university, the company managed to pull off an entertaining 55 minute performance, full of wit, intellect, a bit of dark humor, and even a touching moment or two.

In 2007's Capital Fringe Festival, local actress Zehra Fazal mounted an impressive and potentially controversial staging of My Friend Hitler, a solo show depicting the internal tension the dictator might have felt during his rise to power. Fazal returns to this year's Fringe with another solo production that has been gaining some buzz. Headscarf and the Angry Bitch centers around Zed Headscarf, a character who is trying to be a professional folk-rocker. Using songs and parody, Fazal's original play explores what it means to be a contemporary Muslim-American woman.

The performance places heavy emphasis on all five of the senses, and produces a plethora of texture to be consumed by each one. For touch, the audience is outfitted with "pajamas" and are instructed multiple times to "feast on your neighbor's pajamas." This involves touching and fondling of the various fabrics, feathers and objects that adorn the costumes given to audience members.

You've seen the posters at bus stops all over town, and now tickets to the 2009 Capital Fringe Festival are officially on sale. You know the deal with Fringe: due to its non-curated philosophy, there's basically no way to know in advance if anything showing during the festival will be awesome or a huge flop. But with individual show tickets at $15 a piece and multi-show Fringe Passes ranging from $50 to $300, it's worth it to peruse this year's schedule and consider purchasing in advance. Tickets are available here (don't forget the $5 Fringe Button). The Capital Fringe Festival runs July 9-26.

Over the past several years, there has been an explosion of local dance companies specializing in South Asian dance. Organizations like SAPAN, Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh, Natyam, Dhoonya, and others are not only presenting the gamut of Indian dance, from the popular Bollywood to traditional forms, but are also looking to break new ground by fusing the classical styles of South Asia and the West. The Tehreema Mitha Dance Company is one such ensemble and is presenting its latest effort to cross boundaries with South Asian American Dance, a show currently running at The Capital Fringe Festival.

Such is the famous Chinese-boxes construction of Peter Weiss's The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, mercifully abbreviated as Marat/Sade.

Slash Coleman Has Big Matzo Balls is weird. Weird. But that’s because Slashtipher J. Coleman is weird.

, a smart offering from this year's Capital Fringe Festival, takes such sentiments to heart, and presents a meditation on the power of pictures through a theatrical lens.

Hey, David Gaines! It's not you, Baby. It's me.