Big guns: Robert Cole’s ‘The Thought’ arrives at Fort Fringe.

Ah, ’tis truly the Fringe season: The performances haven’t started yet, but the newest round of Button-bitching has!

Also the griping, especially among the city’s more established actors, about CapFringe’s tight schedules and sometimes improvised technical setups.

(We’re not naming names, and we can’t link it ’cause it’s on a non-public Facebook page. But trust us when we tell you that one performer’s recent status update went like this: “[Name] is still hoping the folks at Fringe will pony up answers to the technical questions they were asked BEFORE Thursday’s 2 hour (yes TWO whole hours, folks) tech [rehearsal].”)

I’m tempted to respond with a big, sarcastic “Waaaaah,” and to point out that as recently as Monday, festival exec-direc Julianne was posting Facebook photos of her crew working sweatily and swiftly to finish half-built venues. I mean, like we (sorta) said last year, it’s Fringe, folks: How they gonna answer a tech question if there’s no tech installed yet?

On the other hand: If I were that actor, with that reputation, doing that punishingly tough show? I might be a little jumpy, too.

So yeah, welcome back, celebrants and critics and carping perfectionists alike, to the mild insanity that is Capital Fringe. The public crazy starts tomorrow, with first-show honors split between repeat-offender Titus X (first produced in D.C. way back in 2002, I think) and Cover Me In Humanness, a brand-new show inspired by a Degas ballerina and a Kevin Bacon movie. (They’re both in tomorrow’s 5 p.m. slot.)

While Julianne & Co have been hoisting the giant sculptures into place — word is that installing some public art might help grease the skids for that keep-the-tent-open-’til 1-a.m. request that’s still pending with the city — we’ve been mucking about behind the scenes here on the blog.

We’ve welcomed some returning guest bloggers and indoctrinated a few new ones into the cult of Fringe & Purge. (Item One in the catechism: Try not to arrive smelling of beer, leave the theater early, and then trash the show — it will annoy the Fringers.)

In a minute: The first of many introductions from the voices you’ll be hearing here at Fringe & Purge this year.  For now: A hat-tip to one of those voices — returning blogger Brett Abelman, who’s done me a solid by putting together a ridiculously comprehensive quick-take on this year’s shows.  In four (!) parts. Starting with a handy seven-part (!!) taxonomy of Fringe Show Types.

(Brett, seriously: You have too much free time.)

Happy Fringing, everybody. See you at the opening-night bash — Thursday night, from 8 until whenever. I’m told there will be banjos.

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.

Curtain time is drawing nearer and nearer, and you can smell the excitement (and stress) here at Fort Fringe.  Or maybe that’s just the faint odor of parmesan cheese that still lingers like an olfactory ghost in the corridors and kitchens of this former Italian restaurant.  Either way, I have to say it’s kind of appetizing.

In any case, here are some photos.  The highly-hyped Baldacchino (a colorful reinterpretation of fixtures like this one at the Vatican): 

And the inside:

And the retro-red box office:

And the rat traps, all in a row: 

I just got a phone call from a friend of mine asking if there was a $15 cover charge for tonight’s opening night party.

The answer, emphatically, is NO! No, no, no.

There is indeed a party, however–tonight, 9 PM, Fort Fringe, 607 New York Ave NW–and it’s free as the wind is windy.

But before the revelry begins, what show(s) are you going to see tonight? Any suggestions?

So I’m sitting in the offices at Fort Fringe right now, and things are most certainly abuzz.  I’ve been here for approximately 7 minutes, and already Julianne Brienza (DC Fringe’s executive director) has had to trek over from her desk to answer the phone (inconveniently located in the corner) 3 times. That’s one phone call every 2.333… minutes, although the frequency is sure to pick up as we get closer and closer to the first shows beginning this evening.

The phone is ringing again, here comes Julianne.  Someone else offers to get it, but she won’t have any of it.

“Don’t worry, I’ll get it, I’m on a roll.”

When she isn’t on the phone–mostly answering inane questions about tickets from chaperones of very large groups of Christian children and the like–Julianne breaks various bits of exciting news to her staff as it comes in on her computer.

For example, lots of press for the Fringe today (Express, Playbill, and City Paper for starters).

And then there’s the DC Theatre Yahoo group, whose moderators have had to limit the number of posts per Fringe production because they were too inundated with the stuff.

“I think that’s great–they have to make a policy because of us!” Julianne laughs.  ”That’s so cool!”

She says that for every email she reads, she gets about 4 more in her inbox.  I’m going to email her a link to this blog post right now from across the room, just to be annoying.  And supportive. Annoying and supportive.

On Monday, we assembled our army of guest bloggers and sat them down with Fringe & Purge theater critic Trey Graham to teach ‘em a thing or two. It was an extremely long, pedantic, and intensive session–half the bloggers couldn’t even make it through the first half without running out of Fort Fringe screaming gibberish–but those of them that did survive the lesson seem to have been made stronger by it. Here are a few of the Training Day highlights:

Trouble viewing? Try the YouTube version of this video.

First, the bad news: In its third year, the Capital Fringe Festival will have to get by without Courtney.

Ah, Courtney. Courtney, whose outré outfits, brassy personality, and shameless sidewalk busking helped draw audiences in droves to her one-woman shows.

Courtney, who last year successfully sent up both Barbarella and Cosmo in a single solo evening.

Courtney who, in the Fringe & Purge confessional at the 2007 opening-night party, cheerfully told the camera about a Fringe fling she’d had the year before with local theatergeek … oh, let’s leave him alone. It was a confessional, after all.

So a moment of silence, if you please, for the dearly departed Courtney, who’s not returning to Fringe — and whose last name we will tactfully omit here — because she’s apparently found domestic bliss in the Twin Cities. God bless her.

But fret not, Fringe devotees: Chocolate Jesus is back, presumably because one sold-out Fringe run in 2007 makes a fringer hungry for another one in 2008.

Slash Coleman is back, apparently looking a lot like Jesus, with an honest-to-God grew-it-himself beard and a show whose title involves the phrase “Big Matzo Balls.”

The indefatigable Hilary Kacser is back, marketing a new show “from veteran Capital Fringe hitmakers” — which, you know, more power to you, sister. It’s nice, in a town that didn’t have a fringe festival until 24* months ago, that we’ve got veteran fringe hit-makers to call our own.

In all, 40-odd Fringe acts are repeat offenders. And 40 percent of this year’s 104 acts call the District of Columbia home. Another 20 percent hail from the Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Those are numbers that CapFringe Executive Director Julianne Brienza rattles off without hesitation — she’s efficient that way, to the point of being a little scary sometimes — and with a kind of pride.

More stats Brienza seems pleased to pimp:

- Fringe is nearly 30 percent bigger, up from 84 presenting artists last year.

- Permanent year-round staff is 30 percent bigger, too, up from 2 to 3. Total festival-month staff: 37, including production management, box office personnel, venue managers, an uber-venue manager to wrangle those ven

- The festival spans 18 days this year, July 10-27, up from 11 — and even if you discount the two Mondays and two Tuesdays when Fringe will take a breather (unlike in past years), there are 14 performance days. Again, almost a 30-percent increase.

Also: One two-year lease on Fringe’s first-ever semi-permanent home. Which was infested, in true fringe tradition, with what Brienza likes to describe as “fierce, man-eating rats.”

(No, seriously: They were so mean they fought back when staffers poked ‘em with sticks. So big and so numerous they reportedly unnerved even developer Doug Jemal, whose company controls the property — and when a D.C. landlord thinks twice about a building tour, you know you’ve got vector control issues.)

Fort Fringe, as Brienza & Co. like to call it, is in the old A.V. Ristorante building at the corner of 6th Street and New York Avenue, NW, behind a gaudy new Fringe Festival awning and next to a towering white marquee that’s been dubbed the Baldacchino. (That would be the fancy white thing in the picture above.)

That tent’ll be an open-air venue and bar, home to some of the festival’s louder acts (they’ll be competing with traffic noise, after all) and to Thursday’s opening-night bash.

Indoors at Fort Fringe: a newly built black-box space, in what apparently used to be an olive pantry, that’ll be available for rent to performing artists all year round.

As for the art? Well, it’s Fringe, so who the hell knows? “Unjuried, risk-taking, independent,” and whatnot. That’s the accentuate-the-positive approach, anyway.

If you’re looking for real-time guidance, I’ll be weighing in — along with several City Paper collaborators and a select cadre of guest reviewers (you’ll be meeting them shortly) — here at Fringe & Purge.

We’ll serve up quick-hit reviews, explainers, reminders, last-minute news, video interviews, and more — in fact, you can already watch highlights from last week’s boozy Fringe Preview night at RFD.

So visit early, visit often, and don’t be afraid to chime in. It’s Fringe, after all: Unjuried, risk-taking, independent — and this year, as user-generated as we can make it.

*Originally that said “48 months,” but I was thinking “two years.” No, really, I swear. C’mon, I’m an arts critic: Math hurts. Back to corrected sentence.

Next: Of Buttons, Rules, and Other Possibly Annoying Fringe Phenomena