2019 CAPITAL FRINGE FESTIVAL
44 posts
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Starcrossed’
Starcrossed is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet with a new pair of starcrossed lovers: Mercutio and Tybalt. Worked seamlessly within the dialogue and story of the original work, these...
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Dispatches from Mike Daisey’s ‘A People’s History,’ Chapters 1 to 18
Over 16 days in Washington, DC, in July 2019, Mike Daisey gave 18 different performances, each about an hour and 45 minutes long, of his epic look at America’s past, present, and future. He drew from...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Inferno the Musical’
“Heaven is so boring.” That’s the complaint of a modern-day version of Dante Alighieri in Inferno the Musical, a look at the vagaries of life and love and the inevitability of fate. Written and...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘SPEAK*Girls Presents’
The true critic of this year’s second annual SPEAK*Girls Presents is a thirteen-year-old young woman, who shared at the rousing end of this year’s production, “I’m hard to impress, and I loved it.”...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘If These Balls Could Talk’
There’s plenty of beef in Carolann Valentino’s one-woman musical, If These Balls Could Talk, about her life as a young actress from Texas working at a steakhouse in New York. This was not just any old...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Home, Sweet, _____’
Home, Sweet, _____ takes audiences on a sentimental journey through music, sight gags, and pantomime. Without words, Home, Sweet, _____ tells the story of a clown, the frenetic Collette Campbell,...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Acuña Acuna’
Whenever Erick Acuña is asked to play Peruvian music, he launches into a burst of rock. Why not, he wonders, since rock is his country’s favorite sound. But rock is not what his hosts expect. No...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Little White Lies’
Four performers appear from unexpected places. Emerging from hallways, stairways and around corners with a rippling and tribal urgency, the movement of the dancers is steered by Y-shaped divining...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘All for the Union’
15 actors. 20 scenes. The Civil War. A lot is at stake in All for the Union, written by the prize-winning playwright, librettist, and historian Meredith Bean McMath and directed by Jenna Powell, and...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Arcade’
Arcade is unlike anything you will experience at Fringe. Equal parts art installation, gaming experience, and nostalgia, Arcade perfectly encapsulates the feeling of walking into a 1980s arcade. The...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Iphigenia in Splott’
Set in a blighted corner of Wales, Iphigenia in Splott is a breathtaking one-woman show, imported from the UK and written by Gary Owen, a Welsh playwright and winner of the Meyer-Whitworth Award for...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Knights of Salisbury’
The Knighthood Players’ Production of The Knights of Salisbury, by Tim Caron, directed by Tim Caron and Ilyana Rose-Davila, with music direction by Jason Schoenfeld, is a nostalgic, though awkward and...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘American Diet’
Here’s a show description you don’t see often: “A dark yet whimsical exploration of food, fitness, body image, and metabolic endocrinology.” And I will say, that’s no lie. In American Diet’s 45 minute...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘EyeSOAR’
EyeSOAR is primarily a dance performance which incorporates video, audio interviews, music, and the spoken word to tell the story of the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. This...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Beyond These Walls’
Beyond These Walls is a provocative contribution to the Capital Fringe, and well worth seeing. It was originally devised in 2018 under the direction of Matt Bassett, Artistic Director of the Hub...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘This Place of Ours’
When done well, dance has a unique ability to tell a compelling narrative through themes that audience members can then adapt to their own perspectives and stories. Moving Body Dance Company has...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review ‘What Wasn’t’
By Rebecca Kurtz Perhaps it is a matter of personal preference that at Fringe I am often more taken by the comedies than by the dramas. The intensely self-involved process of making and performing a...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Nothing Broken’
Nothing Broken is an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Amanda Haddock, directed by Cathy Reinking. It tells the story of Hope, who is grappling with the end of her ten year...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: The Little Senator That Could
The Little Senator That Could held its world premiere at Capital Fringe on July 12, 2019, and it is nearly perfect for Washington, DC. Billed as a comedy, playwright Kirsten Grady’s show is actually a...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Six Months of Winter’
By Helen Ganley Conjuring up images of day and night, one imagines the sun cascading into a pink and purple horizon while the moon excitedly and stoically takes its place in the sky. The picture, in...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Good & Kissed’
Ladies, grab your closest friends, make a post-show dinner reservation, and head to Capital Fringe’s Good & Kissed for a night out that will make you laugh, cry, and spur your own stories of loss and...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Flirting Like an American’
George Washington University researcher Sufian Zhemukhov is a popular guy around Washington. He has several awards for his storytelling and some of the stories he relies on in Flirting Like an...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘She Sings Light’
She Sings Light, written by Claudia Rosales-Waters and directed by Josh Sticklin, is one of four ‘curated’ shows in the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival. That means that this highly symbolic drama—which...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Conversations’
One of the more common phenomena of fringe festivals like ours is to see young actors commit to intensely personal projects, creating a cohesive performance piece that celebrates and reflects on their...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Veneer of Beauty’
Last year, Shaun Michael Johnson put himself on the map as a master storyteller, whose protean moves captivated audiences at the Capital Fringe Festival with Sobriety of Fear, a compelling story about...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Hold the Tomato’
Back at the Fringe Festival after their successful 2018 appearance, Laugh Index Theatre’s production of Hold the Tomato strikes a number of funny bones during its fast-paced series of comic sketches....
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Passing’
Passover, the holiday that marks the Exodus, that signals to Jews and the world that this night is different from all others because we are not slaves, but free, is the moving backdrop to John...
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Daily Dispatches from Mike Daisey’s ‘A People’s History’
[CLICK HERE to read all 18 dispatches in chronological order.] Chapter 18: The Living Moment, July 21 7pm This final chapter continued to retell and reinterpret a people’s history, meaning the...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘I Know It Was the Blood: The Totally True Adventures of a Newfangled Black Woman’
Written, directed, and acted by playwright Tara Lake, I Know It Was the Blood: The Totally True Adventures of a Newfangled Black Woman, is a one-woman trip down the poetic and artful memory lane of...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Oizys in the Waiting Room’
There is reason for concern or apprehension as you scroll the morning headlines or track developing news moment by moment. Closer to home, the cause for unease might be a decision as simple as...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Our Town Plus Zombies’
By Rebecca Kurtz What fun! The Adequate Players make a splash again at Fringe this summer with writer/director/actor John Geoffrion’s one-act parody of Thorton Wilder’s 1938 ode to the small town....
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Heist’
Improv, as any actor knows, is harder than it looks. And dramatic improv—in which actors invent their roles as they go, expanding on a basic situation in ways that are both comic and sad—is even more...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Intimate Dinner’
Anyone who has been a server in a restaurant will likely sympathize with the plight of the well-intentioned and yet deterioratingly cheerful waitress, Lauren, in Intimate Dinner by Lauren French...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘A Short History of Unfortunate Animals’
Aficionados of modern dance and movement theatre take note: if you are hungry for something unique, abstract and poetic, get thee to the Plum space at Arena Stage for A Short History of Unfortunate...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘That’s Not How It Happened’
Funny, sweet, and poignant, Colleen Hindsley’s one-woman show, That’s Not How It Happened, will resonate with anyone who misses their parents, has endured the torture of older siblings, or nearly...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Velvet Determination’
When Cynthia Shaw sits down at the piano and casually busts out Bach’s Allegro from Italian Concerto, you know Velvet Determination isn’t your average Fringe show. Written and performed by Shaw and...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ’52 Pickup’
So here’s the deal: the card game 52 Pickup is, technically, not a game so much as it is a mess. You grab a deck of cards, say “52 pickup!” and scatter the cards every which way. Sometimes it’s in...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘CRAPSHOOT!’
It turns out Al Stone (Todd Blakesley) is that guy – the one who admits to voting for Donald Trump in 2016. His participation in the democratic experiment turns his life upside down. Stone lives in an...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Amelia’
By Rebecca Kurtz There is a lot to love about historical fiction, and writer/director Robert McNamara chose a good branch of history with the beautifully open-ended story of Amelia Earhart’s...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Body.’
If you’re not familiar with devised theater, it’s when an ensemble collaborates on the script, movement, and even score of the production, often through improvisation and storytelling. If you’ve never...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Dust’
Don’t believe your program! Dust is not, in fact, a collection of surreal daydreams to trip your imagination. It is a thought-provoking drama worthy of your attention. It’s the end of the world as we...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Soul Redeemer’
The road to redemption can be an arduous one, especially when you’ve burned so many bridges in the past. LA TI DO Productions’ Soul Redeemer, with a book by Paul Handy, music and lyrics by Neal...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Neverlanding’
Years after Wendy’s tales of lost boys, pirates, and mermaids, Michael Darling is grounded and committed to a hospital when his brother, John, finds him on the roof. In the world premiere of...
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2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Journey to Long Nose’
By Helen Ganley Labeling the DNA sample bottle and depositing it gingerly into the mail slot feels almost like a rite of passage for many Americans. The masses of inhabitants that bask under Lady...
