The tagline for Cracked is “Love. Faith. Motorcycles,” but bikers be warned: this is not the wind-in-your-hair anthem that you might expect. Nor is it a biographical examination of masculinity and fatherhood, as playwright and director Marcus Salley attests in his program note. Cracked is not what The Rude Mechanicals of Fredericksburg describe—but what the […]

Play Cupid is one of the rare Fringe shows that I’m seriously tempted to go see again, which is saying something for a festival this tightly scheduled. I probably won’t get the chance, but I’ll definitely grill my friends who went to see it on other nights about how their show went. That’s because Play […]

Burlesque Classique’s A Midsummer’s Burlesque Dream promises “a sexy, silly romp through the woods with fairies,” and it delivers on that — especially the “silly.”

Full disclosure: The synopsis for Cats Onstage!’s debut show, SpookyMsgPlsFWD!, mentioned unicorns, so I was already highly predisposed to liking it. Unfortunately, not even the presence of mythical beasts could rescue this dystopian parable from its muddled structure and technical mishaps.

Let’s all give a nice big “welcome home!” to prodigal son Zack Myers, a locally-born multi-talent currently based out of Miami. Myers is currently camped out on the fringes of Fringe in the basement of MLK library, where’s he’s presenting a solo show about influential improv comic Del Close, and doing so with a lot […]

Pinky Swear Productions’ quirky cabarets are perennial Capital Fringe favorites, and rightly so. They reliably deliver engaging productions with strong ensemble performances, intriguing themes, and narrative elements of the whimsical and the bizarre. 

Duke Ellington said that jazz is “not an occupation or profession, it’s a compulsion.” In the biographical drama Paul Gonsalves on the Road, Gonsalves, legendary jazz saxophonist and longtime member of Ellington’s orchestra, embodies those words. On the Road chronicles the dramatic arc of a life defined by the push and pull between the beauty […]

Right Brain Performancelab’s The Elephant in the Room has an ambitious goal: To engage the audience with theatrical epistemology by way of vaudeville, musical theater, ballet, Butoh, clowning… And, when it doesn’t quite work, it’s still making its own point. If that sounds a bit out there, it’s Fringe, through and through.

Barabbas Theatre has captured a muse of fire and has ascended to the brightest heaven of invention with its adaptation of William Shakespeare’s dynamic history play, The Life of King Henry the Fifth. Henry V has been retitled H5x7 and that modern handle really tells you all you need to know about the 100 minute […]

Every year we are inundated with Shakespeare adaptations. DC is a city that loves Shakespeare. When companies choose to stage a modern adaptation of one of the Bard’s works, they often approach with a novel concept, in order to make it stand out against the multitudinous adaptations that came before.

When we meet Mary Toft at the beginning of How to Give Birth to a Rabbit, she sings “I’d give my blood” to rise above her life of poverty and indigence, and that’s exactly what she does. Rabbit is the true story of Toft, who in 1726 England began inserting small parts of rabbits inside […]