For now, the party’s still on, so come on down to the tent:

Meanwhile, Fringe diversions, Never-Know-Who-You’ll-Run-Into department: That was activist and brother-annoyer Candace Gingrich at this afternoon’s performance of Children of Medea.

And the street was abuzz about the Secret Service-fueled delay at today’s closing performance of Peace Warriors. The First Lady? The Boss Himself, even, ducking the beer-with-Gates buzz for a bit?

Nope: Apparently it was Rahm Emanuel, whose daughter (so the word on the street had it) was in the show.

So: Y’all seen anybody fun?

Bad Hamlet
The Bodega – at The Trading Post
1013 7th St. NW

Remaining Performances:
Friday, July 17 at 10:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 19 at 4:45 p.m.
Wednesday, July 22 at 7 p.m.

They say: “Two Be Or Not Two Be! Hamlet was published twice: a 1604 bootleg ‘Bad’ edition and the familiar 1623 version. BAD HAMLET is an hour-long mashup of the two texts, where the various differences illuminate and deepen Shakespeare’s masterpiece.”

Trey’s take: OK, look: I’m a giant text geek. When it comes to straight plays — especially serious, ambitious, landmark plays — I’m almost always about the words and the ideas as much as the staging and the acting. (Sorry, Mr. Keach.) So while your mileage may vary, John Geoffrion’s … what do we call this, a collation? … struck me as a Fringe must-see from the start.

The good news is that while Bad Hamlet might have been just an interesting exercise in dramaturgy — honestly, I wondered if it would come off like a staged reading of a Word document, with Track Changes set to the “On” position — it turns out to be a pretty slick little one-hour’s traffic. (Yes, I said one hour — it’s two versions of a four-hour play, but Geoffrion has cut the crap out of it, and it moves briskly.)

Sometimes the twice-told tale is about overlapping dialogue, which can be a touch disorienting; elsewhere, the Dane you know will start a speech, only to hand it off to the Dane you don’t, whose version will stand out sharply in contrast to the version you’ll hear in your head.

It helps that Sarah Denhardt’s staging uses tried-and-true tricks to help you keep track of Regular Hamlet (tall, mopey) and Bad Hamlet (compact, with a swagger), not to mention their twinned Gertrudes, Ophelias, Claudii and Laerteses. Costumes, props, blocking: They all work to bring clarity to the comparison. (My favorite fillip: In that famous climactic fencing match, the first-draft versions of Our Melancholy Hero and His Hotheaded Foe do battle with sturdy medieval swords. Simultaneously, the Hamlet you’re more familiar with uses a slenderer, more elegant rapier to prove his mettle against his similarly armed Laertes.)

That’s a nice shorthand for the differences between the two texts: That earlier draft is blunter, swifter, more urgent, while the one Shakespeare spent more time on makes its points with rather more grace. (Oh, how much more poetry, how much more self-loathing there is in Take 2 of Claudius confession!) You knew that, of course, if you’ve ever read up on the subject, but it’s tremendous fun to see what Geoffrion & Co. make out of the juxtaposition: “To be or not to be” plays like a Socratic dialogue between a passably articulate jock and his more bookish older brother, and if you’ve ever ground your teeth over whether Gertrude buys that “Dad’s ghost says Uncle C. did him in” speech, you’ll be happy about how explicitly she signs on for Hamlet’s revenge plot in the bad-quarto version of the closet scene. Bottom line? The notion that all the best writing is re-writing gets an admirably lucid, singularly entertaining proof here.

See it if: You’ve ever laughed out loud at the words “No, nor woman neither.”

Skip it if: Blank verse leaves you feeling bilious.

So Do You Love Me Yet?

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 18 at 2:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 25 at 6:30 p.m.

They say: “‘I love you’ or ‘I lust you’? What’s the difference? A young black woman tries to find out. Experience the beauty and horror of love and dating in this one-woman show that features spoken-word poetry and storytelling.”

Trey’s take: There’s more beauty than horror here, and not just because writer-performer Farah Lawal is an ingratiating presence onstage. (Though she’s certainly ingratiating — lovely, with a smile that’s sunny and sly by turns, and a talker confident enough to suggest some time spent on slam-poetry stages.) And not just because the evening’s string of matte-finish performance poems (no coincidence that Lawal calls her poetry blog Pearls from Pain) offers more meditations in the mode of hopeful — of happy yearning around the topics of love and loving, couples and coupling — than it does in the key of despair.

Wishful thinking? Hard-earned wisdom? I wouldn’t pretend to know, or presume to guess. But although Lawal can sling sass when it’s called for — you don’t want to be the guy about whom a woman writes a scornful, clean-lined bit of blank verse titled ‘Booty Call,’ do you? — and though she can certainly dial up the darkness effectively — hers is the second show this week that’s name-checked pain as a feeling that’ll suffice in the absence of any other sensation — Lawal and director Leslie Felbain have decided that the prevailing mood in The Bedroom (apt venue, that) should be a generous one, and the overriding tone one of great sweetness. It would seem churlish to respond to So Do You Love Me Yet? with anything less than an equal measure of goodwill.

See it if: You could stand a little optimism as a tonic for your weltschmerz.

Skip it if: The merest whiff of sentiment sets off your Pollyanna alarm.

- muscle-bound bald guy, intensely discussing marginal tax rates and Congressional committee machinations, while monkey noises from “Please Listen: A Musical Chaos” waft from the Baldacchino

The comments await: Light it up, people…

The Saints

Remaining Performances:
Thursday, July 16 at 9:45 p.m.
Friday, July 17 at 6:30 p.m.
Sunday, July 19 at 1:15 p.m.
Wednesday, July 22 at 9:00 p.m.
Sunday, July 26 at 12:30 p.m.

They say: “Saints, sinners, sex, drugs and rock and roll. Imagine Johnny Cash, Janis Joplin, St. Augustine and a bevy of virgin martyrs singin’ songs around a celestial campfire. DMLRR Presents The Saints. Virtue and vaudeville. Burlesque and the blessed: Where the revival tent meets the carnie tent.”

Trey’s take: I’m inclined to agree with the buddy who sat next to me at this noisy, cheeky vaudeville — a handful of electroacoustic hagiographies from the crew what brought you last year’s smash-hit 70-minute Oresteia: “I think it’s constitutionally empirically impossible to dislike this bunch these guys,” said my friend.

Roger that: Led by singer-songwriter Steve McWilliams and actor-director Debra Buonaccorsi, the outfit calls itself Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue, but they’d have done just as well namewise if they’d gone with The Platonic Ideal of Artists Who Fringe for the Sheer Joy of Performing.
There’s a little belly-dance (courtesy of Buonaccorsi, as the spurned mistress of reformed hellion St. Augustine), a little honky-tonk (props to the raw little band, in which most everybody eventually takes part), a touch of panicky fortune-telling (from Felicia Curry, generating solid laughs as a highly strung St. Bernadette) and a whole lot of full-throated singing — all in service to the stories behind names you may know, especially if you’ve been properly catechised.

The irreligious may find things a mite confusing, I’ll admit, if only because the sound mix is sinfully iffy; song lyrics occasionally get muddied, along with whatever biographical details and theological fine points they might be trying to convey. And the curmudgeon huddling deep in my soul insists I whisper to the Rev. Buonnacorsi and her flock that when the pews in your canonically suspect revival tent are chock full of extroverted actorish types, your audience-participation bits are by definition going to annoy the civilians just a tetch.

But pooh to that: The voices are strong, the humor agreeably naughty, and the songs a tasty mix that ranges from rousing little foursquare rockers (for Jordan Klein’s St. Francis, complete with surfer shorts and a small aviary of birds clinging to his hoodie) to soaring, scorching anthems (for Currie’s St. Bernadette and Maria Egler’s Teresa of Avila, ecstatically remembering the “agony and rapture” of their visions) to bluesy brags so swampily accomplished you’ll be thinking, “Hey, that would be perfect with a little harmonica” — just about the time Klein’s strapping St. Ursula pulls a Hohner out of her brassiere.

See it if: You think organized religion could stand a little irreverence. Or if you’ve ever thought Gertrude Stein was unforgivably inefficient about squeezing just four saints into those three acts.

Skip it if: You’re allergic to dusty old relics — or to fun.