hookups is about as naked as it can get at Fringe. A quintet of engaging actors make use of an air mattress and the barest essentials to create a series of vignettes covering every imaginable hookup through history and literature, all with a wry wink and a twist. It’s both cute and crass, like that girl dancing on the pool table you just can’t help but smile at even though you think she’s a drunken idiot. She is, but so are you, so get it on. [Read more...]

There is no pie in A Piece of Pi.

I feel it’s necessary to point this out, because after all, there are clowns. So one might expect some pie-throwing with a show title like that. Or some mathematical musings on the nature of pi. But, there are neither.  [Read more...]

True experimental theater breaks down the divide of expectations between performer and audience. Extroverts usually love this. Introverts, not so much. No surprise then that the long-form improvisation Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical Capital Balloon Ride positively delighted me. It’s like a sociological seminar on human nature, challenging you (ever so subtly) to actually be interested in the people around you. [Read more...]

Every heartbreaker eventually gets their heart broken. Cosmic justice, karma, the wheel of fortune – whatever you call it, the seesaw of relationships will always go from up to down and back again. But there’s a journey there, from paradise to hell and all the shades of grey in between. As Editors put it, “even an end has a start.” [Read more...]

For a crash course on what to expect from Fringe, you can’t do better than banished? productions’ mad avant-garde experience, Tactile Dinner Car. It’s a crazy sociological experiment playing by its own rules, smack dab in the middle of the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent. [Read more...]

Though there’s definitely an element of raunchy radicalism about Fringe, it’s important to remember that there are performances suitable for all. If you have a small child in your life, a sweet outing for you and them would be Wit’s End Puppets presentation of The Malachite Palace.

Combining both shadow puppetry and marionettes, this adaptation of the children’s picture book “Alma Flor Ada” is also bilingual, with dialogue repeated in both Spanish and English in a flow that’s natural and unforced. [Read more...]