DC Metro Spotlight: July 2007

The Capital Fringe Festival was so much fun last year that you’d be crazy to miss this year’s installment, running at various venues around the city, July 19-29. Cap Fringe features more than 500 individual performances involving more than 200 companies, so to say that there is something for everyone is to be guilty of true understatement.

A number of shows will be part of the Fringe, even though their runs are far longer than those 10 days. One notable example is Solas Nua’s production of Tom Murphy’s The Drunkard (Davis Center at Georgetown University, July 12-August 5). Murphy has adapted a 19th-century American temperance play of the same title and transplanted it to rural Ireland in the 1800s. In doing so, he has great fun tweaking every imaginable stereotype of the Irish, but retains the basic story of good and evil and a battle for justice.

What the heck was going on in 1936? Somebody had the bright idea that a film called Reefer Madness might scare people away from the “evils of marijuana,” but the film was so unintentionally funny that it became a cult classic in smoke-filled college theaters in the late 1960s. A few years back, Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney created a riotously funny musical out of the old movie, which will be burning up Studio Theatre’s Stage 4 (July 11-August 5).

The American Century Theatre in Arlington is also reaching back to 1936 for a different brand of lunacy, Hellzapoppin (Gunston Arts Center, July 13-August 18). The show, which ran more than five years on Broadway, was a constantly shifting and chaotic pastiche with no published script; but the folks at American Century have assembled something they think is pretty close to what left audiences weak with laughter so long ago. And it takes a 27-person cast to do it!

The Olney Theatre Center offers a bracing dose of Democracy (July 17-August 12) on its new mainstage. Michael Frayn’s story of intrigue and politics is an imagined but fact-based depiction of the interactions between Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, and his devoted personal assistant Günter Guillaume, who had a secret life as a spy. Olney also presents Godspell (July 5-25), the bright and lively musical based on the Gospel according to St. Matthew, on its historic stage.

Arena Stage reprises Daniel Beaty’s very successful solo hip-hop show Emergence-SEE! (July 5-22) in the Kreeger; it’s about a slave ship that suddenly appears next to the Statue of Liberty in modern times, sending Gotham into a tizzy. Alexandria’s MetroStage revives one of its hits, Three Sistahs (July 26-September 9), a robust musical based very loosely on Chekhov. And Bethesda’s Quotidian Theatre stages George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (July 6-August 5) at The Writer’s Center stage.

Out at Wolf Trap, Michael York stars in the national tour of Camelot (July 10-15), and Marvin Hamlisch will appear with the National Symphony Orchestra Pops for a concert called Hollywood to the Great White Way (July 21) with Broadway stars Anne Runolfsson and Hugh Panaro as guest vocalists.

Parents who are looking to cool off with their kids should check out The Magical Balloon (July 14-August 19) at Arlington’s Classika Theatre. Staged by members of Classika’s partner company, the acclaimed Synetic Theatre, it features Irakli Kavsadze in a show created by Paata Tsikurishvili and choreographed by Irina Tsikurishvili.