The D.C. edition of Bravo’s Real Housewives franchise was its least successful, lasting only one season and one state dinner crashing before cancellation. While television viewers cared little about Michaele Salahi and the rest of what I assume were a vapid cast of characters with boring storylines (I don’t know, I don’t watch that shit), imagining housewives in local neighborhoods is perfect Fringe bait. So it’s no surprise that H Street Housewives was fully booked the first time we tried to see it and is sold out for its final two shows tonight and tomorrow.

Along with their own version of TV executive and Housewives reunion show host Andy Cohen, three ladies and one New Jersey broad that looks suspiciously like a dude compare parenting styles, quibble over an all-powerful email group, and realize they may not be quite as post-racial as they thought. The audience roars whenever a local watering hole gets a shout out. And there are some truly funny lines and a good story as women take sides over a development project that’s “as good as done, just like the streetcars.”

I’m a little surprised at the mix of the housewives cast in this ‘latest incarnation’ of the series. The caricatures at play are a no-nonsense business woman with kids enrolled at a Chinese-Arabic immersion charter school, a devotee of free-range parenting who raises chickens in her yard and suspects the water she’s been given is not gluten free, a charmer with a philandering husband, and the Jersey girl. The cast could have been Capitol Hill Housewives or Park Slope, Brooklyn Housewives. I would have loved to see a lifelong resident facing the gentrification this group is bringing and a hipster couple still living in a group house in the mix. That’s more what I think of when I think of the people living around H Street NE.

Remaining performances:
Thursday, July 25, 6:15 p.m.
Friday, July 26, 10:00 p.m.
At Fort Fringe – Redrum, 612 L Street
Sold out.