Archives for July 9, 2011

In addition to providing the space and freedom for wild and crazy stuff, The Capitol Fringe Festival offers a tremendously important opportunity for plays in development to be staged and get some feedback. Night Sky is such a play. The playwright, Pat Connelly, has been working on Night Sky for several years, rewritten it numerous […]

The experience of being an audience member can be kind of alienating, caught behind the fourth wall. But every once in awhile along comes a performance that can truly feel intimate, in which a person communicates their ideas to the audience with breathtaking efficacy.

Manifesto! is a joyous flight into the world of physical theater. Entire schools of thought are turned on their head and spun into zany interpretations with heart-pumping theatrics. Every word, noise and movement is finely tuned to leave you in hysterics. Characters fly through the air in slow motion sequences. The art movement, Dadaism, is […]

A blank stage and a few boxes are all that is needed to tell a magical tale of Sisters of Ellery Hollow.  The audience is welcomed to the mysterious Ellery Hollow by sisters Abby (Melissa Marie Hmelnicky) and Elsie (Rachel Holt) who proceed to talk about their strange lives. As they point out, they are well […]

John Hefner takes his audience on a coast-to-coast highway adventure bound for … well, nowhere in his one-man performance of  The Road to Nowhere.

Make no mistake about it. Writers rarely perform their personal confessions. Stories of real-life struggles are often told in memoirs, where wrenching personal details can be observed from a safe distance.

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.

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 synchronicity of Flyboy, the story of an astronaut competing for the most challenging space mission ever, premiering on the same day as the final Space Shuttle flight takes off seems oddly appropriate.  This intelligent, absorbing drama points out the sacrifices made by our astronauts and their families while raising issues about what might be […]

A group of Star Trek fans gather at a convention billed as the last public appearance of William Shatner.  When Shatner’s dead body is found (offstage, at his hotel), the story turns into an interactive murder mystery.   That’s the story of Who Killed Captain Kirk?, a mildly diverting comedy from Paco José Madden.

Fringe’s for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf marks the launch of the Colored People’s Theatre Collective, “whose mission is to explore, challenge, and impact how race and diversity are seen on stage.” A heartfelt infusion of poetry, dance, and song, told by an unflinchingly multi-talented cast of women, for […]

In the quest for the perfect comedy, many jokes must be tried. Earning laughs can seem like a battle, and ingenuity is a must to stand out from the field. And that kind of creative energy is what Love Me! Why everyone hates actors is so funny. Though perhaps not the most polished performance piece, […]