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With more than 40 Capital Fringe shows on offer this evening alone, Who You Gonna Call?
Nobody, is who. The Fringeworthy Action News & Commentary Squad is already onsite to offer or informed recommendations. Here’re a half-dozen shows you can see tonight that have earned our imprimatur of excellence.
Will Work For (Gearbox, 6:30 p.m.) — Dacyl Acevedo’s was the first of her family to attend college but still struggled to find steady work for a period of years following the fiscal near-meltdown of 2008. And her story about it got to Rachel Manteuffel. Acevedo “embodies also a small army of the unemployed, as well as those whose employment revolves around unemployed people, but mostly she shows us her frenzied, increasingly desperate self, scrabbling for opportunity and any chance to feel productive,” Rachel averred.
Waiting for Armageddon (Atlas: Lab II, 9:30 p.m.) — Singing satirist Ron Litman’s third Capital Fringe show with Tom Pile is an energetic and funny meditation on the profound We’re Fucked-edness of the hapless human race. And the songs he and longtime collaborator Tom Pile have come up with are catchier than ever. In a better world, a guy with Litman’s talent wouldn’t have to haul garbage for a living; in a lesser one, we wouldn’t know how talented he is.
Isis & Vesco Investigate the Curious Death of Dr. Freud (Fort Fringe: Redrum, 9:30 p.m.) — Lindsey Boyle enjoyed the intellectual workout of trying to keep up with playwright Monique LaForce’s “Law & Order-style cop drama crossed with a psychoanalytic murder mystery in iambic pentameter, with an underlying confusion of the time-space continuum that brings Egyptian pharaohs and Freud together in modern times.”
Dracula. A Love Story (Mountain, 10:30 p.m.) — DC Theatre Scene senior writer Tim Treanor has updated Bram Stoker’s oft-adapted tale of the undead teetotaler, adding weird punctuation to the title and set it in Washington, DC. Joshura Buursma says it that despite his reservations about the finale, it works, calling it “an enjoyable synthesis of self-conscious camp and genuinely engrossing supernatural drama.” That’s pretty much my read on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, of which I am one of a small number of unapologetic defenders. So sold.
Rock Bottom [A Rock Opus] (Warehouse, 11 p.m.) — Our prolific rookie agent Jonelle Walker threw up some devil’s horns for Landless Theatre Company’s grimy account of the final days of Blood Orphans — a fictitious rock band that’s burning out and fading away. “Release your inhibitions and dance,” Agent Walker advised.
Bitch, A Play About Antigone (Fort Fringe: Redrum, 11:45 p.m.) — Playwright Andy Boyd, meanwhile, has taken his inspiration a play even older than Stoker’s novel — about 2,300 years older. David Marshall Bradshaw went all-in for the paranoid technophobia and cynicism of this Naked Theatre Company production, saying that even the making-of video that opens the show contributes to the audience’s feeling of unease. “Ultimately, the show beats idealism bloody,” he concluded.
If you see this shows or others and you agree with our findings or you don’t, Tweet us @Fringeworthy and let us know.
Photo Copyright 2014 by Paul Gillis Photography.