What: Jack Marshall, the guy who compiles the exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) audience guides at The American Century Theater, sits down for an onstage chat with three of D.C.'s very best working actors: Kate Eastwood Norris, Naomi Jacobson, and Rick Foucheux.

Why: At one point or another, I've interviewed (or at least leaned against a lobby bar with) everybody involved, so trust me when I say they've got stories to tell — and not all of them are high-toned meditations on craft.  So go check it out; I'd say "See you there," but that would be a lie, 'cause it's my anniversary, and somehow my already overtaxed credit card and I have managed to snag reservations at Komi.

When: Tonight, 8 o'clock
Where: Theatre Lab, 733 8th Street NW Washington, DC 20001. Check the Google map below.
How much: Pay-What-You-Can, to benefit The Arts Fund for Child Health and Development, run by psychologist (and DC-based actor) Brian Razzino.

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• The Price and Portia Coughlin (3/21/08)
• Maria/Stuart and Jerry Springer: The Opera (8/29/08)
• The "Beckett Duo" (11/7/08)

Glen even sent a headline, which, characteristically, I declined to use.
CP Theater Reviewer to Hie His Pasty Ass Out to L.A. for NEA Fellowship Thingy

Hey. Congratulations.

Hey back, and thanks.

So what is this thing you won, exactly?

It’s officially called — um, hold on a minute, I’m gonna need the press release for this — a Fellowship at the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.

“Institute in Theater and Musical Theater”? What, they teach how to do jazz hands?

You are not the first to make that particular joke. Ass.

So what’s involved?

Next month, I’ll join 22 other theater critics and arts journalists for 10 days in LA for what promises to be a pretty intensive workshop environment. We’ll see a boatload of theater, write a lot (and very quickly) and take master classes with big muckety muck critics and assorted theater types.

It’s training, really. Think the first half of Full Metal Jacket, if Vincent D’Onofrio knew all the words to “I’m Just a Girl Who Cain’t Say No.”

There’s also a strong component of the Fellowship geared to “multimedia and digital skill-building” which I think has something to do with navigating non-WYSIWYG GUIs. Or random assemblages of letters to that effect.

So what do you hope to accomplish?

Um, to suck less? To decrease my net level of suckage?

Seriously: How do you think you’ll be different, after this experience?

Maybe I’ll get fitted for an opera cape? That I can sort of swish and snap around, to express my displeasure at missed lighting cues? Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease?

And if the Fellowship affects me like it affected Graham, who was in the first class of Fellows back in aught-five, I’ll probably use words like “delicious” in my reviews a lot more often than I do now.

SERIOUSLY.

Seriously: The point of it, I think, is pretty much to help me develop the kind of skills that the, er, changing environment (read: apocalyptic wasteland) of arts journalism demands.

I take reviewing very seriously, and it doesn’t come easy. It takes time. I don’t expect that a two-week program, however intensive or instructive, could flick some inner switch such that I would suddenly find it easy to critique the hard work of poorly compensated artists.  I kind of hope that bit never gets easy.

But if it helps me come closer to capturing the totality of a given theatrical experience, well – it’s worth the trip to Los Angeles, and accompanying risk of heat stroke and body dysmorphic disorder.

This is all pretty cool, no?

Well, it makes me happy. But I should make it clear that there’ve been plenty of DC folks who’ve been chosen as Fellows before. Besides Graham, there’s been Tom Avila at MetroWeekly, Missy Frederick at DCist, and Beverly Lindsay-Johnson at WHUT.

And this year, DCist’s Chris Klimek is a fellow…um, Fellow.

So, you know: DC represent!

As the kids say.

...

Said.

In 1993.

Sometimes that can be dull. Sometimes that can lead to moments like this one, in which singer Tracy Lynn Olivera — currently appearing as Fantine in the Signature Theatre's production of Les Misérables — tries out an, erm, un-canonical reading of the character's signature aria, "I Dreamed a Dream," during a January put-in rehearsal:

I'm hearing like three or four different parody styles there — is that a Beyoncé she pulled, right around the minute mark, and did it segue into a Patti LuPone? — and damn if they're not all pretty well executed.

Curse you, Tracy Lynn: Isn't it enough that you're talented in one genre?

Hat-tip to Weslie Woodley and other 'Les Miz' cast members, whose Facebook hysterics alerted me to this gem ...

City List mistakenly listed Studio Theatre's Grey Gardens as closing on Dec. 21–wrong, wrong, wrong. The play runs until Jan. 4 at Studio Theatre. Here's what Trey Graham had to say about it:

Based on the cult-favorite Maysles brothers documentary about two socialites (Jackie O’s relatives, even!) rotting away in a vermin-plagued, plumbing-challenged East Hampton manse, Grey Gardens is as rococo in its better stretches as it is sappily sentimental in its lesser, as conventional and predictable in its first half as it is challenging and adventurous in its second. The true-story tragedy of Act 2 is a haunting, moving thing. Act 1, which still feels like an overlong preface despite the creators’ efforts to lay some explanatory psychological groundwork there—marital discord! engagement-party scandal! drunk sissy pianists!—plays more like a standard-issue drawing-room farce shorn of the usual upbeat, unravel-the-misunderstandings curtain scene.

With those imbalances, and in a space the size of Studio’s 200-seat Metheny Theatre, an entire evening with Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (aka the quirky bohemian heiress Big Edie) and her permanently apron-strung namesake (the downright demented Little Edie) is a bit like a dinner à trois with, say, the merely operatic mid-career Norma Desmond and her full-on batshit twilight-years self: stimulating, and even a bit tragic, but perhaps a little too much for anyone but a real devotee.

Grey Gardens shows Thursdays–Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. $49–$69. Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. (800) 494-8497.

Cheap nostalgia is one of the reasons I enjoyed Altar Boyz, the Jesus-fueled, boy-band satire playing at Bethesda Theatre.

The setting: The Altar Boyz, a designer-dressed Christian boy band from suburban Ohio, are playing the last concert of their national tour. During every show they measure the evangelical success of their music using the Soul Sensor DX-12, a device which reveals how many audience members have yet to "come to Jesus." By the end of the show, the group has sung, danced, and confessed its way through 12 songs but hasn't managed to bring the number of lost souls down to zero (the dark answer as to why makes the ending).

There's much to enjoy right on the surface: the constant stream of Christ-checking (the Christian practice of incorporating praise, thanks, or confession into every, single, fucking sentence), the funny names of the band–Matthew, Mark, Luke, Juan, and Abraham (the lone Jewish member), and the dancing, which is never as technically clean as N'Sync or the Back Street Boys, and twice as "duurty."

The singing is better than you might expect for an "off-Broadway production," and the camp and irreverence draw laughs even while the characters are positing discomfiting platitudes. Yet at certain points, the authenticity made me shrink into my seat. Altar Boyz touches on some serious Christian conflicts: Mark is a closet case, Luke is an alcoholic, and Matthew (the leader of the group) is the guy who circumvents his belief in chastity by arguing that blowjobs don't count (ok, that last part wasn't really in the play–but having grown up a Jesus Freak, I know the "BJs don't count" type when I see 'em).

By the one-hour mark, I reconciled myself to the fact that the musical wasn't going to explore Mark's crush on Matthew, or Luke's lust for the blood of Christ. Sex and substances are big issues, and it seems that there's no light-hearted way to confront the socially conservative undercurrents of the contemporary Youth Group movement. This revelation almost kept me from enjoying the last minutes of the play, which in turn caused me to feel even worse.

Leave it to an agnostic to let guilt get in the way of a really good religious satire.

Altar Boyz plays at Bethesda Theatre, 7719 Wisconsin Ave., Bethesda, through Jan. 3. (301) 657-7827.

Why is this play important? For starters, it's not at the Kennedy Center, it doesn't feature any famous people, and this isn't its last stop before it heads back to Broadway. The Snow Queen is an important play because its cast is made up partially of deaf actors, because the proceeds from the play go to scholarships, and because the play features people flying. You probably won't see another play with all three of these elements for a very long time (see flying here).

Find out more information about the Snow Queen at Gallaudet University.

Don't know yet if we're going to have time/space/money in the print paper to re-review The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which is getting a much-deserved revival at the H Street Playhouse.

So let this be your cue: Go buy a ticket. The April-May run of Stephen Adly Guirguis' play was probably the single most thrilling piece of theater I've seen all year.

I mean: I'm a jaded 40-year-old theater critic, with a bad attitude most days, and I've been to more bad plays this year than I had bad one-night stands back in my 20s. And I cried like a damn baby at this show.

I'm telling everybody I know to go see it. I'm even pimping this play (which, y'know, isn't exactly PG) to the public-TV audience. Here's the script for my Best Bet on on WETA's Around Town, which I'm going over to Shirlington to tape in a few hours:

Something new opens in DC theaters pretty much every week, so I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on shows I've already reviewed — especially shows that closed back in May. I'm gonna make an exception this week, though, for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot — because it's coming back. And if you love the reach and the ambition and the intimacy and the power that makes theater theater, you really must go see this show. It's the story of the trial of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, and it's set in a court in Purgatory. The judge is a dead Confederate who hanged himself on the day Lee surrendered; the witnesses include Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud, Santa Monica and the Devil himself. This play — it's a meditation on the tension between divine mercy and human free will — is funny, and moving, and profane, and sad, and oh, man, the way it uses *language* — it's just downright intoxicating, and it was the best thing I saw onstage this year. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, revived with all of the original cast all but one of the original cast*, at the H Street Playhouse to December 21.

The WETA audience won't see that until next week, after the show has opened. But you's my CP peeps, so you get the first heads-up.

Seriously: Go spend an evening with Judas. My original review is over here in the CP archive, if you need more convincing.

*Whoops. Got a call from Michael Dove. Turns out Maggie Glauber's having twins, and — though initially it *was* supposed to be the whole original cast — she won't be playing Mother Teresa again. My bad.

One drawback, however: If you're running just a teeny bit late for your own show, you may find yourself hurrying past the queued-up patrons.

At 15 minutes before your announced curtain time.

Because there's not so much a stage door.

The Stranger's Brendan Kiley offers 10 suggestions. No. 7? "Build bars."

Photo by Flickr user A Clear Blue Sky

Princess Leia! Wasn't she the one who saved the universe despite being, like, C-3PO's daughter or something? Well guess what? PRINCESS LEIA IS BACK!!!!!

Except now she lives in the D.C. area and is you.

In anticipation of Leia-portraya Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which will bow Sept. 5, Arena Stage is holding a Princess Leia lookalike contest. Just take a picture of yourself dressed like Luke Skywalker's girlfriend or whatever (but don't stick Cinnabons on your ears and hold a spray bottle, because some wag has beaten you to it), and e-mail it here by Sept. 7, and you could win tickets to the show or at least bring a signed poster from Wishful Drinking back to your little robot farm on Tatooine.

Those are fleeting pleasures, though, compared to the pride you'll feel when your coworkers see you dressed like one of Jabba the Hutt's hootchies. Hey, those aren't the droids you're looking for!

I'm actually at Fort Fringe as I type–formerly known as A.V. Ristorante Italiano–which the festival folks have artfully transformed into their guerilla headquarters, complete with offices in a crumbling bar, a two-tiered tent deemed the Baldacchino in the parking lot, and a permanent black box theater in what used to be a meat-curing pantry.  I will be blogging live from here until the shows begin this evening–so if you want to know if the toilets will be working in time for the opening night party later, you know where to look for updates.

Oh yeah, there's a party: 9 PM at Fort Fringe, 607 New York Avenue NW.  But really this festival is all about the performances, so turn off your computers, get off your rolling chairs, and go check out a show or two or twenty.  Then visit Fringe & Purge and let everyone know what you thought.  

Ever since, we've been positively inundated with questions, compliments, and offers of a decidedly salacious nature. Rather than responding individually, I've decided to offer some answers right here, for all to see.

After the jump:

Is Fringe & Purge my go-to place for the inside scoop, the low-down, and/or the nitty-gritty on this year's Fringe Festival?

Yes. Yes it is.

Will Trey Graham and Glen Weldon, perennial Fringe & Purge all-stars, be back and better than ever?

Yes. Yes they will.

Will there be totally awesome videos, photographs, reviews, commentary, and more?

Why yes, now that you mention it.

Is it true that Brian Reed blew off a date with Miss America 2006 to attend the final Fringe Happy Hour?

Brian, I'm not going to dignify your feeble ploy by responding to this or any subsequent red herrings.

Enough of this pitter-patter; watch the sneak previews below:

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version of this video.