Some lovely photos below (and after the jump) courtesy of Aude Guerrucci!

7(x1) Samurai:

Read the rest of this entry »

Dig it.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Thousands of Years—Rome
Flashpoint - Mead Theatre Lab

Remaining performances:
July 24, 9:30 p.m.; July 25, 6 p.m.; July 26, 1 p.m.; July 27, 12 p.m.

They say: “Thousands of Years—Rome takes a Roman Legionnaire and a Senator’s daughter from their 1st Century parting in the Roman Forum to their 21st Century reunion there. They participate in the Roman conquests of Britain and Spain, the Renaissance, Unification of Italy, Nazi occupation of Rome, and the Iraq war.”

Ted’s take: Like the rape of the Sabine women or the reign of the Emperor Otho, this is an hour and change that I will never, ever get back. The accompanying wherefore, however, is hard to peg. Calling the play historical romance is an insult to that already debased epithet; calling the whole thing a vacuous cliché would be an insult to vacuums.

Take Dead Again, mix it with a little Forrest Gump and a touch of Quo Vadis, then toss in the “never let go” moment from Titanic, and you’ll have a good sense for this piece. Spanning twenty centuries (and making each look at its watch and squirm), Thousands of Years traces the ill-starred love of Octavia and Marius (or, after 800 A.D., Mario) through various pitfalls and entanglements including but not limited to:

• war
• sickness
• poverty
• bad luck
• “Daddy don’t approve”

and, last but not least,

• a toothsome, barely-clad Boadicea, to whose military superiority, leather undergarments, and general sexiness Marius eventually responds by making lotsa whoopee…

…thus spawning future hordes of Marii for the reenactment ad nauseum of said pitfalls and entanglements. The acting is difficult to watch, not merely because of the technical glitches in a technically spare show (before every gunshot scene, the audience hears whisper-shouts of “Two shots or three?” “It’s three.” “Three gunshots?” “Yes, three.” “Okay! Three gunshots”…and then the effect),* or even because the term doesn’t necessarily apply—it’s difficult to watch because one likes and feels for the actors nearly immediately, as one never can for the characters in whose service they toil.

The Washington Post, in its rather mindless promotion of this piece, exhorts readers: “When in Rome, Love as Romans Do, Over Again.” The proper epithet for my money? “Sic transit gloria…over and over again.”

See it if: You’ve always wondered why “bodacious” means what it means.

Skip it if: You believe, as I do, that reading a facing-page translation of Livy might provide a more titillating, better staged, and adequately lit experience.

*It bears acknowledging that the reviewer saw the show on opening night, and that these glitches may well right themselves in successive performances.

A kindly commentator by the name of Rory left the following beneath Trey’s pube-centric “All in a Day’s Fringe” post:

Why can’t I find a place to post comments about shows that were not reviewed? I LOVED the “Diamond Dead” show and cannot find an appropriate place to share.

To Rory, we say: it’s folks like you that keep us honest.

And so, with less than a week left in the festival, we at Fringe & Purge were thinking it’s about time to solicit a sort of civilian roundup. This is your invitation to weigh in on what rocked, what tanked, and — especially if you’ve got any backstage scandals or barroom stories to share — what went down at your Fringe.

Tales of Doomed Love (or is it ever worth it?)
Studio Theatre, Stage Four

Remaining performances:
July 24, 9 p.m.
July 25 at 6 p.m.
July 26 at 6:30
July 27 at 2 p.m.

They say: Funny, biting, and heart wrenching, classic stories turned on their heads ask us if love is really worth all the pain, shining unexpected new light on the answer. The Triangle Independent called Tales… in development “The best original script we saw in this region last year.” From veteran Capital Fringe hit-makers.

Ted’s take: Funny, strange, and reasonably nimble in its epochal leaps, Tales functions best as a greatest hits compilation. As with any compilation, purists may gripe that “Philomela was underrepresented” or that “they should have included more of Euripides’ early stuff”—but there’s comfort in the familiar, and even if you can’t whistle along with every confessional episode, you can at least tune in and out without fear of losing the frequency.

Your characters? Romeo & Juliet (herein traduced to high school sweethearts); Glauce, Jason’s Corinthian replacement for Medea; Agamemnon, daughter-slaughterer at Aulis; Lisé, jilted step-sister to Cinderella; and King Mark, husband to Isolde and occasional dallier with Tristan. The humor? Neat, allusive, and the beneficiary of a consistently light touch. Best moments: Hilary Kacser’s blithely girlish turns as Juliet, and her backtracking explanation (as Lisé) of dismembering herself (”I should clarify…”). The drawbacks are simple: an hour and change of soliloquies tends to drain, while the soliloquies themselves spend half their time in confessional exposition.

What did I learn?

• That a pastiche’s imperative is to tell oft-told stories either better or differently, which, despite occasional lulls and hackneyings, this one does.
• That the rosiness-by-dimunition of this Romeo and Juliet rendering does little to abate the consistently doomstruck nature of the piece; on the contrary, it poignantly highlights what makes the tales, if barely, worth it.

See it if: You always sided with Dido vs. Aeneas…and you enjoyed Stardust more than you care to admit.

Skip it if: You can’t restrain your skepticism when you hear someone’s got a new take on Homer, Shakespeare, or Euripides.

This past Thursday, the stars, architects and friends of Fringe converged under the Baldacchino for an evening of romance and revelry. Watch in awe as a gaggle of performers spill the beans on their upcoming shows.

Cheers!

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version.

Through the Looking Glass
The Shop at Fort Fringe

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, 7/13, 2 pm
Wednesday, 7/16; 8 pm
Sunday, 7/20, 8 pm

They say: “In this original adaptation of ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll, Alice travels back to Wonderland when tricked by her own reflection. Through creative movement and sound, the creatures of Wonderland haphazardly guide Alice on a tumultuous journey to get back through the looking glass.”

Ted’s take: In critiquing this production, one is likely to transgress the lines with which the play opens:

It shall not touch with breath of bale
The pleasance of our fairy tale.

Perhaps, one muses, they would have done better to open with a couplet from the epilogue:

Lingering onward dreamily
in an evening of July–

…which of course is what this production does, lingering onward so dreamily that its thirty-five minutes begin to feel more like the sixty with which the festival program credits them. That said, it is widely observed that one of Wonderland’s signature offerings is a reprieve from the flow of time—and so whatever quibbling breaths of bale I might offer are unlikely to sully the pleasance of this piece.

Omniumgatherum’s version of Wonderland boasts a reprieve from various other temporal fixtures–props and a set, to name two. The players serve as these, and as characters in a neatly minimalist evocation of the acentric, hallucinogenically alienating nature of the Other World. That otherworldliness establishes itself too in the lovely dissonant drone of the three flowers-turned-Weird-Sisters who befriend and befuddle Alice upon her emergence from the mirror and quickly teach her the lessons of Wonderland, where curiosity is punished, idiom is whipped, and trees become sexual predators.

Meanwhile, Alice charms, batting her blue-painted eyes (look carefully–they match her socks), and holding the audience rapt with the simple stuff (building a house of cards, staring at herself in the mirror). None of the players, however, corners the market on comic timing, and some decent scenes get overshadowed by some very high-schoolish gaffes: facing upstage, half-baked English accents, an episode or two of awkward shouting, and a great general shuffling about by way of…dance.

As Alice might say, “Curiouser and curiouser.”

See it if: You’re a sucker for lamé and tutus.

Skip it if: You consider Jefferson Airplane inadequate interpreters of Lewis Carroll.

This just in—may want to reshuffle your Fringe schedule if you were planning on seeing any of the following.

Shows cancelled for the full run:

• Just Add Glitter
• Tartuffe
• The Legislative Process
• Break Even

…plus, the midnight showing of Signor Deluso & the Women has been nixed for July 17.

Further bulletins as events warrant.  I’m off to the Shop to check out Through the Looking Glass.

On July 2nd at RFD’s, the beer flowed mightily and the crowd went nuts over some sneak peeks at this year’s festival.

Read about it here; watch it below.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version of this video.

Watch and listen as Fringe & Purge chats with Jeffrey of Speakeasy D.C., Mark and Sabrina of Happenstance Theater, and Julianne and Scott, the masterminds behind D.C. Fringe.

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version of this video