Remaining Performances:
Sunday, July 20 @4pm
Thursday, July 24 @9pm
Friday, July 25 @9pm
Sunday, July 27 @2pm

They say: “Our food supply depends on bees. In this one-man play, Lorenzo Langstroth – scientist, minister, author, abolitionist, raconteur and manic-depressive – shares his experience of 19th-century life, his observations and love of bees, and insights into the natural and spiritual worlds. His 1851 invention of the modern beehive changed agriculture forever.”

Glen’s take:Let’s get the bona fides out of the way: writer/performer Marc Hoffman is a Director of the Maryland State Beekeepers Association. Okay? The man knows an Apis mellifera from an Apis cerana. That’s probably why Bee Man is at its best in those moments when Hoffman’s expressing Langstroth’s — and presumably his own — enthusiasm and admiration for the li’l buggers. Hoffman seems confident and completely at home discussing the finer points of apiculture, as when he proudly walks the audience through the design and construction of Langstroth patent beehive.

That’s the stuff that takes up most of Act I, and it’s never less than interesting. Acts II and III, however, move away from wide-eyed bee-geekery to concern themselves with Langstroth’s later years, when he was fighting over his patents and his legacy. Hoffman’s less on his game here: he seems always to be searching for his next line, and indicates Langstroth’s emotional difficulties by shouting a bit. The founder of modern apiculture was a man of many facets, and the script duly hits each one — minister, scientist, manic-depressive, etc. — but it does so in a perfunctory, whistle-stop manner that never quite resolves into a three-dimensional picture.

What it feels like, of course, is the stuff of school assemblies and on-the-hour performances at your local science museum. That’s not a dig — as a dutiful profile of an interesting historical figure, Bee Man succeeds. But as a piece of theater — much less fringe theater? Bee Man … is a dutiful profile of an interesting historical figure.

See it if: You were going to anyway, given the subject matter.

Skip it if: You appreciation for the one-man biographical show has been forever tainted by Bob Odenkirk’s Lincoln (“I was born in a log cabin. MADE OF LOGS!”).

Remaining Performances:
Saturday, July 19 @ 3pm
Friday, July 25 @ 7pm
Saturday, July 26 @ 8pm

They say: “You probably know that Abe Lincoln was the 16th US president, but did you know he was a joke teller? See Abe tell his amusing anecdotes and relate some of his historical decision-making moments before your very eyes, moments before he leaves for Ford’s Theatre to meet his fate.”

Suzyn’s take: I’m fairly new to theatrical reviewing, but I’m certain it’s never a good thing when a reviewer of a comedy act has “Fozzie Bear” underlined multiple times in her notebook. Regrettably, this is the case for my notes on Scott Renz’s “Abraham Lincoln: A One-Man Show.” From the first minutes of the show, when Renz told a joke about how a lady with a feathered hat who fell down reminded him of a duck because she had “feathers on her head and was down on her behind,” I was exchanging what-the-fuck looks with everyone else in the room under the age of forty.

The old people, however, laughed consistently throughout the entire show.

I was sitting in front of a cranky-sounding couple in perhaps their late fifties. Moments before the show, the husband had looked around the performance space, which is essentially a room with chairs and benches, and observed:

“We could turn our sub-basement into a theatre.”

His wife blandly responded “They’d have a heck of a walk from the metro.”

To me, that was funnier than anything that happened during the actual show, but sure enough as the lights came up the lady was saying how she wished she could remember all of those jokes to tell her grandkids.

Some grandkids out there just seriously dodged a bullet.

For the entire show Renz stands center-stage in his Lincoln hat, telling joke after joke, pausing after each to wait for the audience to laugh. The jokes have no connection to each other. The experience is exactly like being around my husband’s joke-telling great uncle from Clemson, South Carolina. To Renz’s credit, almost all of his jokes reference something Lincoln might actually have joked about, from P.T. Barnum to Temperance Committees to General Ulysses S. Grant. According to the autobiographical sketch Renz handed out, he gives talks to elementary school classes as Abe Lincoln and I totally believe he’s good at that. Lack of research isn’t the issue here—it’s lack of funny.

Renz ends with a passionate recitation of the Gettysburg address, which is tactically extremely clever as it is impossible not to applaud wildly at the Gettysburg address. But it also undermined the pass I wanted to give him on the lameness of his comedy. I get that not everybody has what I consider a sophisticated sense of humor, and yes, a solid third of the audience had a wonderful time, and I so want to say that’s enough. After all, there aren’t a lot of Fringe shows to which you can safely bring Grandma or little Stephanie, and this is one of them. Still, as the Gettysburg Address reminded me, Abe Lincoln was a really, really awesome human being. He kept America from tearing itself apart, he wrote words about justice that still resonate with us today, he worked to free a people from slavery and in the end, his actions cost him his life.

Abraham Lincoln deserves better than this show, and so do you.

See it if: You’re somebody’s goofy uncle, you like anecdotal humor or you’ve got a friend or relative who matches one of those descriptions and you’d like to share the Fringe festival with that person.

Skip it if: None of the above applies, especially if you’re David Herbert Donald.

Revenge of the Cat-Headed Baby and Other True Tales about Life and Death
Cole Studio

Remaining Performances:
Sunday, 7/13, 3pm
Wednesday, 7/16, 6:30pm
Saturday, 7/19, 9pm
Saturday, 7/26, 5pm
Sunday, 7/27, 4pm

They say: “Revenge… uses conversational storytelling as a vehicle for exploring 5 unique viewpoints on life and death. Ride along as we regale you with tales of war, procreation, chainsaws, telenovelas, and of course the Cat-Headed Baby.  This program follows in the fine footsteps of last year’s smash, Chocolate Jesus.”

Glen’s take: The SpeakeasyDC folks know their marketing.  “Washington’s premier storytelling organization” has two shows in Fringe this year, and one of them — the returning Chocolate Jesus at Chief Ike’s — already looks to be selling out all over again.  But before there was word of mouth, there was that kickass title, which you can bet put more than a few curious asses in seats.

We may be looking at Jesus Redux here, if the crowd packed into the teensy Borderstan artist’s studio for Cat-Headed Baby is anything to go by.  More than a few of my fellow fringegoers owned up to being drawn there by the name, and if the show doesn’t exactly deliver on its fanciful titular promise, it does supply a healthy dose of more prosaic — as in factual — pleasures.

Five performers, five true autobiographical tales, told well.  No, not simply told — shaped.  And that’s the key: as each story unfolds, you find yourself noting how well each storyteller directs the flow of the narrative, wrasslin’ it into submission with a gesture, callback, or well-timed pause.  The particular subjects in question (in order: girlhood, war, boyhood, cancer, girlhood again, and birth control) don’t do the experience justice, because the performers aren’t interested in such abstractions — they just wanna tell you a story.  Does the fact that these tales have been so carefully molded occasionally cause them to come off a bit … well, canned?  Is the “my parents say crazy things in funny accents!” school of comedy represented?  And do the performers, in the interest of investing their stories with “heart”, occasionally stray into the decidedly un-Fringey territory of Moral Uplift?  Yes, yes and yes.  But you’ll forgive ‘em.

See it if: Even four years after his death, your heart still bears a Spalding Gray-shaped hole.

Skip it if: You prefer your Fringe fare more in the nihilist/deconstructionist/vivisectionist vein, thank you very much.