Mark Whitney is a convicted felon. The door-to-door vacuum salesman turned (somewhat willing) victim of predatory lending tells the audience his tale in the one-man Fringe Festival performance Fool for A Client. The story, naturally, is more than just his time in the clink; it’s a scathing look at modern society’s Zero Tolerance culture that’s responsible for everything from the notoriously critiqued Federal Sentencing Guidelines (a calculator decides your fate) to school district rules…

When you buy a ticket for something billed as a “musical comedy” involving drag queens, a Christian televangelist and a beauty pageant, you come expecting a raucous, fabulous, over-the-top, and — let’s be honest — a quite filthy good time. Instead, the Fringe Festival’s The Miss Teen Jesus Pageant commits the worst sin for this type of production: meekness. The convoluted plot is as follows: the inexplicably crazy Christian daughter of two gay dads…