Performing arts live & uncensored, promises the cover of program of the seventh Capital Fringe Festival, which will once again occupy a mix of year-round and seasonal performance venues—-18 sites this year—-for three weekends in the dead of summer, July 12 to 29.
The photo on the cover is of a young woman who appears to be splattered, Carrie-at-the-prom style, with yellow paint. I am curious: yellow? Her hair is flying behind her as though her body is hurtling at a high rate of speed towards the right side of the frame.
Inside, the paint-spattered motif persists. We find descriptions of 133 shows (ish; I only counted once); roughly the same number on the bill the last two years. They’re grouped into categories: Comedy (65 shows), Dance & Physical Theatre (15), Drama (34), Musical Theatre & Opera (19).
As ever, with so much variety and only a postage stamp-sized image and brief text description of each offering, entrants that can accost the eye with their titles seize an instant advantage: Beef Encounter (Ruminant British Comedy). Dr. Science’s Science Time Science-va-ganza! (Science-tastic Satire). Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream (Punk Rock Shakespeare, obviously). Pizza Failure (Fascist Lavender Crispy). The “high-flying, lowbrow scatalogical Commedia spectacular” Tight Assets. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, whatever the hell that is.
Several award-winners from last year’s festival have returned. Best Musical winners Pinky Swear Productions will once again sweat it out beneath the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent with Cabaret XXX: Love the One You’re With. Pointless Theare Co., which took Best Experimental last year for Hugo Ball, will bring us the “apocalyptic hero spectacle” puppet show Imagination Meltdown Adventure. Best Drama winners Grain of Sand Theatre bring us Raising Cane: A Family Portrait, about a clan of brawlers. And Nu Sass Productions, who took the Best Comedy award last year, is changing up their game with the drama Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay , which promises “take you inside the community of Occupy DC to explore the question: Does Occupy matter?”
Other familiar firms and personages from prior Fringes are back, too. A Faction of Fools present its third annual Fool for All, titled Tales of Marriage and Mozzarella. Playwright Stephen Spotswood brings us the “bloody comic tragedy” We Tiresias. Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Revue is doing The Brontes, wherein Charlotte, Emily, Anne, and Branwell “trade Victorian repression for rock and roll expression.”
Also, there is a one man show about Tupac Shakur. Presumably he will not be played by a hologram.
Tickets for the seventh Capital Fringe Festival go on sale June 18. Details here.