Fresh from winning both Best Overall Show and Audience Choice Best Comedy at this summer’s Pick of the Fringe Awards, Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending is back with both a bang and a whimper, courtesy of two characters who in the original are relatively minor. Here they come forcefully into their own, in […]
Cavers
Gertie Stovall is a middle-aged woman who lives alone in a dilapidated farmhouse that is on the verge of foreclosure. She’s a spunky free spirit who is beloved in the community despite her propensity to threaten trespassers with a nonfunctional rifle. When she discovers a massive cave under the property, she believes that it is […]
The Poet Warriors
The lyrics are no more than serviceable, the story moves in random fits and starts, some of the acting is not of the greatest, and the dialogue is occluded with cliché (“time moves…like molasses in January,” writes Miriam [Arielle Goodman], ostensibly a Harvard graduate, to her war-bound husband), but when these folks open their mouths […]
Widespread voting irregularities cause DCTS to rescind 2010 Fringe awards
DC Theatre Scene announced this morning that it was rescinding its 2010 Fringe Awards after a canvas of the votes revealed widespread voting irregularities. DCTS will be giving no Fringe Awards in 2010.
DCTS announces Fringe poll winners
Congratulations to those Capital Fringe productions which received a rating of 4 or 5 from our reviewers. They became the nominees for the DCTS Best of Fringe awards and, on Sunday, July 25 we opened the polls so that our readers could select the final winners. We deeply regret that voting irregularities seriously impacted the […]
Personal reflections on this year’s Fringe musicals
It wasn’t hard to select my favorite musicals of this year’s Capital Fringe Festival ( I’ll get to them in just a minute) because so many of this year’s so-called musicals sucked. The majority of them had poorly written scores, books, and lyrics, and casts that couldn’t sing in key if their lives depended on […]
Some personal reflections on the Fringe
While there are numerous awards for Fringe productions, I would like to honor some individual and group performances that made the 2010 Capital Fringe Festival a memorable experience for me. However, I only saw 27 productions (i.e., only 20% of the 132 total) so please chip in with your own comments on who should receive […]
Three Fringe shows extend their runs
If you think Capital Fringe ended on Sunday, you are only partially right. You still have a chance to see three productions: one is continuing its run and two are making the jump from Fringe stage to new venues. Super Claudio Bros, the new musical about video game superheroes starring Matthew Anderson, played to sold-out […]
The MacCloskey and Myers Complete Do-It-Yourself Comedy Hour
The Board of Directors of an international dog-food company once held a meeting, with legendary results. They had just released a new product which represented the cutting edge in canine nutrition. It came, moreover, with the endorsement of leading celebrities, and it was the beneficiary of a smart, well-financed advertising campaign.
Fringe Star Darin Ellis dead at 24
Darin Ellis, a gifted actor and singer who had a featured part in the Capital Fringe show Assembly Required: How to Write, Produce and Stage a Musical, the Musical, died on July 22. According to his aunt, the cause of death was congestive heart failure.
How the Money Goes
Although Theatre of the Absurd is often associated with mid-twentieth century European writers, How the Money Goes is a relatively new (2008) absurd comedy from American playwright Robert Cousins. While it receives a spirited production from a talented troupe from the University of Maryland’s Theatre Department, the work is ultimately a little too sprawling to […]
2 Reprises – In Pursuit of the English Rose and Disorder
I had seen both of Hillary Kacser’s one-woman plays in previous Fringes. I immoderately enjoyed Rose, which was a portrait of a single character in Doris Lessing’s justly famous book “In Search of the English” in 2006. On the other hand, DISORDEr, which I saw last year, struck me as a DISASTEr. I went this […]