For our last stop on the Fringe Festival venue tour, newly-shaven producing artistic director Scot McKenzie tells us about Apothecary, a former pharmacy and retail store devastated by fire in D.C.’s Civil Rights-era riots. Today the space is host to art galleries, fashion shows, and—with the help of an improvised sprung floor—Fringe’s more dance-oriented productions.
Insect Factory is Silver Spring guitarist Jeff Barsky. By day, Mr. Barsky is a mild-mannered fourth grade teacher. But come nightfall, he metamorphoses into an axe-wielding noisenik whose intense guitar drones would bug out even the calmest 10-year-old. Fringe & Purge caught up with Barsky in advance of his Friday gig under Fort Fringe’s Baldacchino [...]
Once an antebellum print shop dating back to the 1830s, the spooky, airy Wonderbox now serves as a good backdrop for post-apocalyptic fantasies. Navid Azeez — venue manager, 9:30 Club lighting director, and emcee with local band Whole Damme Delegation — tells us a little about it.
Shot and edited by Matt Bevilacqua.
In the upper recesses of Fort Fringe is a room where Jack Torrance could have very well hacked someone to death with an axe. So naturally, the good folks at the Capital Fringe Festival saw it as an ideal space to put on plays.
Shot and edited by Matt Bevilacqua.
Behold The Shop, the newest of three stages located inside the Fort Fringe complex. Though fatigued after two sleepless days of prep, producing artistic director Scot McKenzie agreed to talk to us about the theater-in-the-round once used as a storeroom for salsicce.
Shot and edited by Matt Bevilacqua.
In Which Three WCP Theater Critics Set Out To Discuss Matters of Pressing Import, But Get Stuck Bitching About Draconian Late-Seating Policies, Tapped Kegs and The Fact That The Apothecary is HOT AS BALLS.
Glen Weldon: All right, Graham. Klimek. It’s about time we blew the lid off a subject that THE MAN doesn’t want [...]
Look, the SpeakeasyDC guys don’t need our help — they’ve a proven record at Fringe as both vets and all-stars, they’re selling out shows. So they really don’t need us to tell you the show’s pretty great, but they’re getting it anyway, because, turns out? The show’s pretty great.
Let’s face it, people. This is some full-contact theater, up in here. Yes, the venues are hot; we’ve all watched drops of persperation fly from performers’ noses every time they turn their heads, describing graceful, albeit funky, arcs over the footlights. But that comes with the territory. Herewith, we honor those who’ve given their lives, or at least their ability to thumb-wrestle for a while, to Fringe.
Roth is on to something, here; she’s created some interesting parallels between father and son. She’s still pushing them at us, rather than letting the us find them — which is why, I think, that scene in which one of George’s dementia-fueled WWII memories combines with Andy’s Nam flashback feels as needless and over-the-top as it does.
MacIntyre has given the thing a crisp narrative shape, and each monologue is flecked with lovely bits of language and the kind of small, telling detail that turns anecdote into art. Tonally, however, the evening never moves off the starting block — each vignette covers the same, smallish patch of emotional terrain, and, perhaps inevitably, MacIntyre’s performance keeps hitting the same beats, and the emotional delineations between the stages of Kathleen’s life blur together.
