Photo via Capital Fringe.

Reminds us of: A middle school musical produced for history class.

Flop, Fine or Fringe-tastic? Flop.

The premise held great promise: the true tale of a woman in the 1700s who convinced the English masses—all the way up to the king—that she’d given birth to rabbits, told in song. As oddball historical footnotes go, it’s a pretty good one. Both before and after people found out it was a hoax, Mary Toft’s gruesome scheme was the talk of the country. But the sung-through retelling, unfortunately, will not be.

The story advances via text projected on the back wall, which was particularly necessary because audio problems made it difficult to understand about half of the lyrics. Those that we did hear …. we largely wished we hadn’t. About three quarters of the way through, a trippy montage features spinning rabbits, newspaper clippings, drawings of skulls, and other flashing images, while the on-stage band plays a raucous rock tune. A voiceover presumably tells the audience how the Tofts got caught, but almost none of it was intelligible over the blaring music.

At one point, Mary’s scheming husband sings, “Let us be more than we ever dreamed to be.” We dreamed this show would be short, and mercifully, it was. Skip it and read the Wikipedia article instead.

How To Give Birth To A Rabbit is playing at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on July 14 at 9:45 p.m., July 16 at 7:15 p.m., July 22 at 9:45 p.m., and July 24 at 6 p.m.

See here for more of DCist’s Capital Fringe 2016 reviews.