Remaining Performances: Wednesday, July 22nd at 10 p.m.; Friday, July 24th at 8 p.m. [SOLD OUT]; Sunday, July 26th at 2 p.m.

They say:  “Riding on the sold-out success of last year’s Chocolate Jesus and Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby, SpeakeasyDC presents yet another sure-to-be-Fringe-fave, THE SIN SHOW featuring true stories about pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and wrath.”

Glen’s take:  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, they got a rave in the paper blog of record.  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.

It’s great for the reasons their previous Fringe outings were:  With seeming effortlessness, these stories, and these storytellers, provoke precisely what they mean to — gasps, laughter (raucous and rueful, in turn),  along with quieter, more introspective reactions.

That seeming effortlessness is part of the game, because it’s clear that all seven performers — though they may evince varying degrees of comfort in front of an audience, or at least an audience this size — have worked over their stories,  shaped them, honed them into the versions they present to us.

This is particulalry true of the two tales that bookend the evening:  John Kevin “Gluttony” Boggs’ sardonic account of quitting cigarettes, and the emporkening that ensued; and Seaton “Envy”  Smith’s blisteringly funny screed against an old college classmate, which is nothing less than a master class in comic timing.

So, yeah, it’s great.  But let’s just note that their previous Fringe outings featured fewer performers (Chocolate Jesus: Four, Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby: Five) in more intimate spaces, so those evenings felt satisfyingly cohesive.

The Sin Show is looser, and considerably longer, and more uneven.  With seven performers, it’s easier to discern those who still need to work on their confidence, and those — like Saurabh “Lust” Tak, whose spin on the line “a warm TICKLE ran through my body” reduced the dude in front of me to boar-like snorting  — who’ve got it going on.

See it if: That Spalding-Gray-shaped hole in your heart? Yeah, it’s still there.

Skip it if:  “Shaped? Crafted?  That’s bullshit — Fringe means fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants!  First-thought-best-thought!  Boy, I’m angry about how unfair that is, but I will use this anger to inform my blowetry.”

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. Let’s just remember that as uncomfortable as you feel — sitting there in the dark, fanning yourself with your program like a pasha — the performers have it worse, by an order of magnitude.  Or at least, once you factor in costumes, lights and physical exertion, by a good 10 degrees Farhenheit.

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.

Our first honoree is hardcore, people.

Who: Lynn-Jane Foreman, actor

Show: Missing Pages

How: Scripted onstage tussle becomes unscripted onstage fall. A nasty one.

Didn’t have room for it in the review, but wanted to honor Foreman’s grit.  She takes a spill, landing on her tailbone, smacking her head against the stage.  Does she take even a beat to gather herself?  To take a breath, to shake it off?  She does not.

She’s back in the scene immediately — delivering her lines sitting up on the floor until getting helped to her feet.  Play goes on for a bit, during which time she shows not a trace of discomfort.  Has some difficulty leaving stage after the curtain call, and the call goes up for a doctor.  She is driven to the emergency room.

Diagnosis:  Concussion, broken thumb.

I am reliably informed that she’s doing all right, and will be back for tonight’s performance and the others.  (I am also informed that Fringe has added a second air conditioner to the Redrum venue, which will be a relief to her fellow performers, especially poor Christopher Guy Thorn, who spends the show in a heavy army jacket.)

You got a nomination for the Fringe Hall of Ouchy Fame?  Someone faint from the heat, slip in a pool of their own sweat, or just spill your beer at the Baldacchino?  Tell us about it below.

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 19th at 6:45 p.m.; Thursday, July 23 at 5:30 p.m.;  Saturday, July 25th at 4:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 26th at 2:15 p.m.

They say: “A World War II hero, his daughter and Vietnam veteran son confront the secrets that haunt and divide them. This powerful new drama, lightened with laughter, was inspired by the author’s father, whose war diary she discovered after his death.

Glen’s Take:  ”Emerging” local playwright Susan Austin Roth is a well-known and highly successful writer of gardening books, so should you see other reviews of Missing Pages busting out a lot of cheap gardening puns, you’ll know why.  Not here, though.  No, faithful F and P reader, here you will find no references to grafting, cutting or pruning;  that is my solemn vow.

A play that revolves around Alzheimer’s has a tough row to hoe.

Senile dementia is characterized by repetition, and that needs to be conveyed; one of Roth’s subjects, here, is the frustration that accompanies caring for aging parent.  For that frustration to register, we have to feel a bit of what is felt by her characters, doting Charlotte (Lynn-Jane Foreman) and taciturn Vietnam vet Andy (Joe Peck) as they struggle to deal with George, their alternately sweet and belligerent father (Robert Leembruggen).

That their father repeats himself so often is dramaturgically fraught, because in drama, repetition good, repetitiveness bad.  Those  moments when Leembruggen’s proud WWII-vet becomes lucid enought to chastise his son for being a deserter, coward and traitor feel real, all right, but they don’t move – they hit such similar dramatic beats that it begins to feel as if whole scenes have been cut-and-pasted throughout the script.

That would be a bigger problem if Leembruggen weren’t so appealing an actor — and one confident enough to convey George’s disease without broad, movie-of-the-week strokes.

Roth is on to something, here; she’s crafted some interesting parallels between father and son.  At this point, she’s still pushing them at us instead of letting us find them, which which is why, I think, the scene in which one of the father’s WWII memories combines with the son’s ‘Nam flashbacks feels as needless and over-the-top as it does.

Director Diana Denley tries to make it work, and is elsewhere quite nimble at the kind of low-fi stagecraft Fringe demands, but it’s no use.

Even so, Roth’s ending is satisfying and legitimately moving. Once her script loses its rhetorical training wheels, and she excises from her dialogue the kind of pre-digested bits of language more apt to crop up on TV than in real life (viz: “And what about what I need?” “He’s your father, too!” and “I know, Dad. I know.”) Missing Pages will be get leaner, tighter, and more effective.  If this current Fringe staging feels a litle shaggy and unkempt, well [GARDENING REFERENCE REDACTED.]

See it if:  You approach Fringe like a theater workshop, and are looking to discover a serious, rough but promising work.

Skip it if: You approach Fringe like last call at Camelot. (Woo!  Boobies!)  Or the phrase “My war was different than your war” sets off alarm bells.

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 18th, 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, July 19th, 3:45 p.m.

They Say: “The romantic life of a contemporary Irishwoman is illuminated in bittersweet, often comic tales of coming of age, illicit love affairs gone wrong, an unforgettable plan for revenge, and its surprising aftermath.”

Glen’s Take:  Scheinman’s preview precis sheds a bit more light:  ”One-woman show; reminiscences of a brandy-swilling Irish lass delivered in a soupy brogue.”

The one woman in question, possessed of both brandy and brogue, is one Polly MacIntyre, whose show takes the form of four brief slice-of-life monologues — each one, in this case, sliced neatly from the life of a character named Kathleen.

We first meet her as teenager as she recounts to us — in hushed, embarrassed whispers — the tale of her decidedly unromantic deflowering.  A quick backstage change of hairstyle later, and a slightly older Kathleen shares with us the tale of her abortive romance with a pompous musician.  Next, she finds herself thrust into the role of mistress, afloat in a romantic limbo that’s beginning to wear at her nerves, and finally we come upon a middle-aged Kathleen waiting in a Paris cafe, attempting to figure out just how she ended up there.

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;  perhaps inevitably, MacIntyre’s performance keeps hitting the same beats, and the emotional delineations between the stages of Kathleen’s life blur together.

“Bittersweet?” Well, sure — but unvaryingly so;  I found myself wishing for MacIntyre to connect more directly with the audience, to let us feel the bitter, and the sweet, more plainly.  In the closing monologue of She Moved Through the Fair, Kathleen arrives at an interesting, introspective place – and if what preceded it had evinced a cleaner dramatic arc, we might have arrived there with her.

See it if:  Emotional arc, schmemotional arc:  You’re just up for some stories in which men are revealed as the slags and weasels you know them to be.

Skip it if:  The interstitial Celtic music will give you brown acid Enya flashbacks.

Headscarf and the Angry Bitch by Zehra Fazal

Remaining Performances:
Jul 17th at 8:30 p.m.
Jul 18th at 3:30 p.m.

They say: “Join Zed Headscarf on a tongue-in-cheek romp through faith and growing up Muslim in America. Featuring hits like ‘The Only Thing I’ll Do Five Times a Day is You’ and ‘I Lost My Virginity During Ramadan.’ This beef ain’t halal!”

Mike’s take: The future of American-Islamic relations could hinge on this one-woman show. Before Muslim folk-rocker Zed Headscarf (Zehra Fazal) got involved, America’s most memorable depictions of Islam were a.) Lil Kim sporting a hijab and not much else on the cover of One World and b.) that episode of Southpark wherein the boys travel to Afghanistan to return a mail-order goat to its starving family. (And to kill Osama bin Laden, who, in the words of Cartman, “has a small penis.”) No wonder those pious clerics up and declared America’s objectification of women and obsession with dick jokes as deserving of–dare I say it?–jihad! Zed Headscarf, infidel-licking lesbian though she be, really could change all that.

After strummbling through a spotlit ballad about the displeasures of navigating airport security in Muslim garb, Headscarf introduces herself to her fake/real audience as the new employee of a generic-sounding Islamic cultural group whose job it is to talk up the Good Kitab on a tri-county lecture circuit (her first!). Lesson no. 1 is that Fazal, who disappears offstage after her introduction and returns with a dusty Koran that she blows off to nervous laughter, has no intentions of skirting the controversy that defined her 2007 show, My Friend Hitler.

Lesson no. 2 introduces the tension that Fazal whips out whenever Headscarf’s Inside Islam jokes fall flat: Haraam vs. Halal, the bizarre dichotomy that continues to frame the experiences of so many Muslim-American women.

Headscarf defines haraam as something bad, sinful, or unclean, and contextualizes it thusly: “Dude, it wasn’t kosher when you gave my mom a rimjob–that was haraam.” She defines halal as something appropriate, or prepared in accordance with Islamic law, though in all fairness, it’s really just a catch-all for the fun things that would make a jihadist happy if only he could get his mind–and mouth–around a fuzzy navel. (The use-it-in-a-sentence example for halal is much better when Headscarf says it.)

The show is broken up into lectures, at the end of which Headscarf invites her audience to return to the next lecture, and the stage goes dark. When the lights come up seconds later, Headscarf has the look of well, a Muslim woman who has just been scolded by her imam for talking about how much she loves eating pussy. The pattern of apology, diversion, song, and escalation to obscenity provides an easy and enjoyable sense of structure. Due to the close quarters of the Warehouse and my propensity for sweating, however, I can say that 55 minutes may have been 10 minutes too long for me. It’s tight in there, after all, and an hour is just long enough to recognize, applaud, and then tire of Fazal’s affinity for repetition.

Fans of dramatic one-person shows be warned: Headscarf and the Angry Bitch borrows liberally from narrative standup comedy, and much less so from, uh, people who do really serious one-person plays–almost to the point that I forgot I was watching theatre. If she could only trim some of the dead weight from her script and learn how to play that acoustic guitar that she’s always wailing on, Fazal and her show–dark and stormy social commentary included–wouldn’t be out of place on Comedy Central. Like Maria Bamford without the pugs or Zach Galifianakis without the leotard.

See it if: You want to hear someone sing about Pakistani papas bemoaning their daughter’s sexual orientation to the tune of Smooth Criminal.

Skip it if: You are a terrorist.

Remaining Performances: Wednesday, July 15th at 5 p.m.; Friday, July 24th at 8:00 p.m.; Saturday, July 25th at 10:30 p.m.

They Say: “This (sic) satirical musical comedy. Hugh Diffindoffer, a young immigrant from ‘Nonexzistia’ comes to America. His journey leads him to become The Number One Bodybuilder in the World, Movie Star in the World and finally, Leader of the Free World.”

Glen’s Take: They also say: “127 Minutes.”  So yeah; know that.

Look, the songs by Tom Hyndman are solid, the harmonies both precise and euphonious, and the band, led by Mary Sugar, is tight.  They sound great — yes, grampa, they’re loud (amplifiers + teensy space = scowls from the Olive-Garden early-bird contingent) — but they’re great.

The music itself is pleasingly catchy;  it’s lyrically that the songs underperform.   Many of Hynder’s most hummable tunes dispense with the verse as quickly as possible so they can head straight for the chorus and homestead there, but that’s par for the Broadway course.

The problem — and it gets to be a big one, after the first hour — is that those choruses, in true “The Song That Goes Like This” fashion, tend to consist of a given song’s title, repeated and repeated and repeated.  That’s a good way to pump up a song’s earworm potential, certainly (you’re not gonna forget that “Across the Bay” refrain anytime soon, pal), but it serves to makes Hyndman’s songwriting seem flatter, thinner, than his agreeable melodies would indicate.

What’s filling the gaps between the songs is a lot of Schwarzenegger jokes, which come off more than a little dated and more than a lot corny-as-hell. (Number of times, by my count, that the script goes to the “I’ll be back” well: Five.)

But you can’t say that Harv Lester, as the Schwarzenegger stand-in, doesn’t commit himself to the Ah-nuld impression that hacky stand-ups have been doing since, oh, the late Jurassic. And Gillian Shelley, as the ersatz Maria Shriver, knows that she can get a laugh with even a lousy joke by delivering it with a quick tilt of the head downstage and a faraway expression.

But the hour-and-change running time (they must have done some cutting; they need to do more) and broadside-of-a-barn satirical targets (video clips parodying Entertainment Tonight bring the proceedings to a screeching halt, every time) make for slow, and only fitfully entertaining, going.

See it if: You’ll gladly suffer some tired puns for some catchy ditties, and believe cheesiness to be its own reward.

Skip it if: You reached for the remote whenever “Pumping Up with Hanz and Franz” came on. TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO.

The comments await: Light it up, people…

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, June 12 at 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, June 19 at 3:45 p.m.; Saturday, June 25 at 10:00 p.m.

They Say: “Expect the unexpected in this musical story about lost souls condemned to perform A Christmas Carol in Hell until they get it right. If the show is REALLY good, some souls might get out …. HONEST!”

Glen’s Take: Hoo boy.

Okay. One of the great things about Fringe is the way it gives artists a chance to perform before audiences they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Let’s not forget that allowing less-than-seasoned performers, directors and writers a chance to ditch the floaties and test themselves in open water is a Really Big Deal.

In return, we Fringe audiences get the chance to make exciting new discoveries. The price we pay for that opportunity, of course, is risk of disappointment. Serious disappointment.

Crushing, soul-sickening, is-this-thing-really-two-hours, Jesus-fuck-I-need-a-beer disappointment.

But we have a responsibility, too. When we see something we love, we must needs tell others about it. And when we see something which gives rise to that particular species of disappointment delineated above, we are charged with the responsibility not to be complete dicks about it. (That’s right, I’m calling you out, continuously sniggering skinny-jeaned hipsters two rows behind me. I mean, I understand where you’re coming from — trust me — but c’mon.)

So let’s not be complete dicks and merely note that The Devil’s Christmas Carol, Greenbelt’s OutoftheBlackBox (all one word, they insist) Theatre Company’s world-premiere musical, evinces more “hey-gang-let’s-put-on-a-show” gumption than discernible craft. The acting’s mostly of the saw-the-air-too-much-with-your-hand variety, the book repeats and repeats and repeats its points, and the songs tend toward listless, dirgy, unmelodic plaints, like the first act’s “Little Mistakes”, sung by an obstetrician who’s botched a delivery: (”Little mistakes/Little mistakes/Everyone makes/Little mistakes”) or the the third(!) act’s “Chains (or, What the Dickens?)”: (”Shake your chains/Shake your chains/Shake your cha-aiiiins.”)

A note about the notes: The actors sing along to pre-recorded music, which is a tremendously difficult thing for veteran performers to pull off, so it’s no suprise when most of the cast keeps coming in too late or too early. The reason it’s so noticeable is that the melody track, which is perhaps intended to guide the vocals, overpowers them instead; you can only hear the words being sung when the cast’s timing is off, which is dismayingly often.

The blessed exception: Kayla Dixon, an 8th grader at Hyattsville Middle School, has the pipes — and the chops — to hold her own against the Casio Tone’s atonal oppression. She’s a natural, a diamond in the (really, no kiddng, you have no idea how) rough. Young Zachary Pinkham, as a quick-to-anger infernal potentate, seems equally at home onstage; get this kid something more substantive to play with.

So, yeah. Some sparks of light, so it would be a mistake to call The Devil’s Christmas Carol completely inept.

But, good Lord, it isn’t ept.

See it if: You are enlightened enough to find pleasure in witnessing a group of perfectly nice people who clearly love the theater throwing themselves in with both feet. Or you are a black-hearted, tiny-souled, skinny-jeaned hipster looking for a Guffman fix.

Skip it if: You are anyone else.

Also, I’m curious what people think so far of this year’s more densely situated venues.  I work in the Mount Vernon Square-Convention Center node, and it definitely strikes me as more vibrant than last year, when the venues were spread out across northwest.  Then again, maybe it’s just the swarms of middle school tour groups going to my head. (They wear name tags; we wear buttons.)

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