Over the past several years, there has been an explosion of local dance companies specializing in South Asian dance. Organizations like SAPAN, Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh, Natyam, Dhoonya, and others are not only presenting the gamut of Indian dance, from the popular Bollywood to traditional forms, but are also looking to break new ground by fusing the classical styles of South Asia and the West. The Tehreema Mitha Dance Company is one such ensemble and is......

Jonathon Church as the Marquis de Sade in Forum Theatre's Marat/Sade. Photo by Melissa Blackall. Asylum director Coulmier personally welcomes you as you step into the septic green confines of the bathhouse at Charenton, silently congratulating yourself on the liberal Enlightenment values that have brought you here to watch Coulmier’s lunatics perform a history-play penned by his most notorious patient, Donatien Alphonse François de Sade. It’s therapy, for them and for him, this playacting.......

Slash Coleman Has Big Matzo Balls is weird. Weird. But that’s because Slashtipher J. Coleman is weird. The one-man play is a representation of the playwright-actor-jazz pianist-author-comedian-painter’s Jewish, eccentric, and quick mind. It is a collection of one-liners and songs, audience participation and balls-to-the-wind gimmicks. Actually, the play is about Slash—he changed his name from Jeffrey after his Bar Mitzvah to include two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the name his grandfather, who survived......

The thing about all those clichés like, "A picture is worth a thousand words"? They're actually kinda true. Iconicity, a smart offering from this year's Capital Fringe Festival, takes such sentiments to heart, and presents a meditation on the power of pictures through a theatrical lens. The title refers to the production's emphasis on iconic imagery and unforgettable, universal events. The "Where Were You?" sentiment we all fall prey to when discussing historical happenings of......

Hey, David Gaines! It's not you, Baby. It's me. Gaines is the gifted mime and movement artist who reduces Akira Kurosawa's epic 1954 masterpiece The Seven Samurai to 45 minutes and a cast of one in 7 (x1) Samurai. He is by any standard an estimable man with a list of credits longer than Toshiro Mifune's katana. He evokes distinct characters using only his body and his voice (though he utters but a single English......

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund exists to help comics artists and merchants who fall victim to dubious obscenity law prosecutions, like the one that anchors the premise of David Johnson's Busted Jesus Comics. While the Fringe Festival isn't supposed to have an ethos, really, Busted Jesus still feels like an ideal piece of material for it: The show is initially abrasive, almost daring you to form an lazy judgment of both the playwright and......

It might seem like a stretch to weave together a coming-of-age-story about two Korean-American girls with Alice In Wonderland and the Greek myth of Medea. But writer/performer Sue Jin Song does this with ease, and her one-woman show, Children of Medea at the Capital Fringe Festival, is a fascinating story performed by a compelling performer. Song embodies all the characters present in her narrative, namely two sisters and their emotionally-withdrawn father. The story teeters intriguingly......

Horatio Hornbeam likes nuts. In his mouth. And if you didn't get it the first time, you'll have dozens of reminders of this fact throughout the production of I Like Nuts! (The Musical), playing at Studio Theatre for the Capital Fringe Festival. The hammering home of such silliness is part of the charm of I Like Nuts!, but it also quickly wears thin. Those who are fans of the "Deez Nuts" school of humor should......

Is it possible to have a raucously good time at a production of a Greek tragedy? Those under the tents at the rocking performance of Dizzy Miss Lizzie's Roadside Revue Presents: The Orestia can answer the hypothetical with a resounding, "Yes!" The show, presented by the folks from Spooky Action Theater Company infuses the Aeschylus classic with a burlesque sensibility, and a rock score to boot. The Furies? Leather-clad, neon-wigged sex bombs with a chilling......

On April 20, 1939, Billie Holiday recorded the song Strange Fruit. Written by a Jewish schoolteacher, Abel Meeropol, it became an instant hit and to this day serves as a poignant protest song against injustice. It is also an example—along with images of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel walking arm in arm with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma—of one of the more celebrated characteristics of the peculiar African-American/Jewish-American relationship: that of two groups bonded by......

At the intersection of today's American realities and mindboggling fictional dystopia sits Mike Daisey, at a table with a glass of water and a metal briefcase (yes, the one filled with irony). His monologue performance for the Fringe Festival at Woolly Mammoth Theatre is a stellar showcase of storytelling skills, bringing the audience along a trip through the desert to Trinity, the site of the first nuclear bomb test in Los Alamos, with a narrative......

You know John Hefner, even if you don’t know him. He’s a total geek — a costume-dressing, trivia-spouting, shows-Ravenous-to-all-his-first-dates geek. I mean that in a friendly, even admiring way. He seems to be under the impression that his geekdom is an out-of-control malady that exacerbates his dating woes, but really now. We live in the Age of Geeks. The jock-jerk in the White House is as despised as any U.S. president has ever been. Those......

Music that attempts to fuse traditional and contemporary forms always draws some trepidation. Sometimes it works. After all, one of this year's best shows combined Indian classical music with electronic grooves. Many times, however, the results are just schmaltzy dreck, devoid of any emotion or integrity. Last night's performance by the Mystic Warriors fell somewhere in between these two extremes. While the musicianship was first rate and the melodies and rhythms were haunting, there were......

If Monday rolls around and you haven't spent all your cash on alcoholic refreshments for the 4th of July weekend, here's another way to get rid of your dough: Tickets for the Capital Fringe Festival are now on sale. Visit here to get a synopsis of each show running during the 18-day festival, and we can tell you, the selection is diverse. Cabaret, burlesque, one-man shows, operas about talk show hosts, clowns, samurai and Shakespeare.......

The annual summertime deluge of theater shows comes back again this year with the Capital Fringe Festival, which announced today it will run from July 10 to 27. The non-profit, which started the city-wide festival in 2006, took home two well-deserved awards last year for their programming, the Mayor's Arts Award for Innovation in the Arts and the Momentum Award from the Downtown DC BID. This year's festival promises us even more shows and participants:......

We reported last year that local arts venue Warehouse was forced to start closing down its 7th Street NW location due to skyrocketing property taxes. The bar and music venue closed last summer, but the rest of the space will continue to run through the Fringe Festival in July. In the meantime, they want to hear from you about how to improve their space when they finally move, and have set up a series of......

Happy Almost Holidays, Washington. With both Monday and Tuesday counting as a holiday for the federal government this year, most of D.C. is staring down a nice, long holiday break today. Even if you don't celebrate Christmas, federal holidays are great for a lot of other reasons besides a day off - you don't have to feed parking meters, for instance. But The Examiner reports that that fact isn't stopping people from shoveling coins into......

Good news in time for Christmas this year; the Warehouse Theater will continue to operate through next summer, according to the institution. The venue is currently hosting Scena Theater's The Maids and will have new shows in February and March. That also means it remains a venue for next year's Fringe Festival. The Warehouse is still looking for a new home. Despite the usual winter doldrums that December brings, there are still a number of......

And for his next trick, monologuist Josh Lefkowitz will riff for 85 minutes on how hard it is to be a 26-year-old artist struggling to write a follow-up to his celebrated show from the 2006 Capital Fringe Festival, lest he be forced to, well, get a job. Also, he loves his girlfriend, but once he became a success — Heaven forfend! — other attractive women started hitting on him. Yep, it sure sounds like the......

While SFist cringed at the fatal dose of crime littering the Bay Area, it found solace in Hillary Clinton's San Francisco campaign headquarters opening, which featured loads of exposed mammary glands. In other news, SF Taxi Commission ruled that Satan's cab must keep its (in)famous medallion number, 666; and in an un-fashion-forward frenzy, San Francisco Fashion Week (chortle) bars bloggers from covering and getting smashed at their shows and parties, respectively. Also, they found a......

A little love, please, for Trixie Little and her sidekick/nemesis/duet partner, the Evil Hate Monkey. We can say without fear of contradiction that Trixie is best and bendiest burlesque detective we know, and Evil is without a doubt her most simian lover/termentor. This Baltimore-based dynamic duo has plenty of local admirers thanks to their appearances at the Birchmere, Palace of Wonders, and elsewhere — and unlike Batman & Robin, they are refreshingly open about......

Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind (30 Plays in 60 Minutes), the long-running signature show of Chicago’s the Neo-Futurists that we reviewed yesterday, requires each of its performers to be a hybrid of improv artist, actor, athlete, and polemicist. Notwishstanding the fact that the team currently performing the show in the Fringe Festival is 40% female, it also takes some serious balls. Because although you can rest assured that if a “play”......

FRIDAY: >> Tired of putting those great costume ideas on the back burner till October? Dying for a chance to wear a costume without wearing a jacket over top? Three Stars vets New Rock Church of Fire feel the same way. Tonight, join NRCOF, D.C.'s The Gaskets and Richmond's The Invisibles at the Rock & Roll Hotel for July-O-Ween. Incognito fun, rip roaring rock from all three bands, DJ sets, drink specials, a costume contest......

The phrase “review-proof” usually denotes some property so universally recognizable and demonstrably saleable that no amount of critical huffing and puffing can possibly derail its commercial invincibility. Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind is something else. Yeah, it’s an established property, at least in Chicago, homebase of its creators, the Neo-Futurists. (Think the Groundlings, except less obsessed with getting on Saturday Night Live.) The hometown show has been up and running for at......

Rachel Manteuffel gives a fetching and formidable performance as Grace O'Malley in A Most Notorious Woman, part of the Capital Fringe Festival. And we're better for it - after all, who doesn't want to hear about the adventures of a spitfire, 16th century female pirate? A Most Notorious Woman, written by playwright Maggie Cronin, has a rather fluid structure, jumping quickly from present time to the past, from Ireland to England, without much warning. At......

If the Capital Fringe Festival had a jury prize for Best Production, Indigo, A Blues Opera would likely be a top contender. Karma Mayet Johnson, a central player in the choreo-drama, wrote, directed, and produced the piece in collaboration with members of the cast and design team. Well-executed music, dance, and impressionistic movement augment a powerful script with deep emotional themes. The result is a lyrical and poetic portrayal of two women’s struggle to attain......

Composer/conductor Armando Bayolo tried to go through the usual channels in order to form the chamber ensemble he envisioned. Gathering paperwork and networking was unsuccessful, so he turned to every musician’s best friend, Craigslist. The call led to seven area musicians coming together to form the core of what would become Great Noise Ensemble (GNE). The initial plan was to have a small ensemble, but there was enough interest in the group that after some......

Kristin Cantwell, the solo performer in the cabaret show Butter: A Love Story, proves an affable host for the evening. Taking on the persona of a Paula-Deen-heavy amalgam of Food Network personality types, she introduces us to the wonders of the butter bacon burger, the importance of creating a mood with "roombiance," and the assets of Taylor the Latte Boy, who services her at Starbucks. If only the girl could sing. Cantwell has assembled an......

This playful, irreverent melodrama, a splendid performance of the 2007 Capital Fringe Festival, is a presentation of Solas Nua, the nonprofit dedicated to presenting the contemporary works of Irish artists to better acquaint the District with modern culture of the Emerald Isle. Tom Murphy, the play’s celebrated playwright, has created this modern adaptation to reflect Irish politics of the Land League and tenants rights. As you might imagine, The Drunkard is fraught with Irish stereotypes,......

You’ve got to know you’re tempting fate when you decide to call the show you’re staging as part of a festival of more than a hundred, Other Plans. The name sure ain’t sexy, but at least it’s descriptive: This anthology of one-act plays, written by Stephanie Alice Scarpinato and directed by Ty Hallmark, isn’t a total loss, but it’s hardly essential. Of the four pieces here, three could use another rewrite while the other, And......