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Ubiquitous director Jeremy Skidmore's tenacious production of A Few Good Men, the play that gave us Aaaron Sorkin, cuts a dashing figure in its dress whites. Reviewed in this week's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.
Photo by Paul Gillis, courtesy Capital Fringe
And with this, my four-week-and-change tour of duty covering the Capital Fringe Festival for a fourth consecutive year comes to an end.
This year’s Fringe might’ve been the best yet. I didn’t get to do as much writing as I wanted, what with my dayjob being more demanding than in Fringes past and with Fringe & Purge running 96 “Hip Shot” reviews this year—about a third more than we’ve ever published before, the overwhelmingly majority of them edited by me.
I did get to record, edit and post six episodes of the Fringe & PurgeCast; again, fewer than I managed last year, but at least a couple of them turned out well, I think. My favorite was this one with Live Action Theatre company, obviously.
Saturday is my birthday, and I need a rest, so I’m going to take this weekend off. But I’m available. Editors, I shall entertain your offers.
1. Pop Culture Happy Hour
I was delighted to sit in on this week’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, a Very Special Episode we -- okay, I -- have decided to call "The Cavil Over Henry Cavill." The A-topic this week was the arrival of Man of Steel, the muscled-up, darkened-down reboot of Superman film franchise that is, we all agree, short on humor. Also short on height. Zing!
Any regular listener to the show will know that Glen Weldon, my pal-for-life and 25 percent of the show’s regular lineup (along with host Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson and Trey Graham), just spent the better part of two years researching and writing the marvelous Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. I recently ran a freezing cold 12-mile death race wearing a Superman T-shirt, so our credentials are roughly equivalent.
But they didn’t exactly need a second longtime Supes fan. I snuck in by mocking Henry Cavill’s average-ish height. He is, for the record, exactly as tall as I am if you believe IMDB, an authority on which actor heights seem to be self-reported.
“I think he makes you feel short,” Linda teased me during the show.
Ouch. But I am not alone. My film-critic crush Dana Stevens said on the Slate Culture Gabfest this week -- an episode featuring the Gabfest debut of one Glen (Superman:The Unauthorized Biography) Weldon -- that she kept picturing Cavill “standing on a milk crate. Amy Adams seems strapping compared to him.”
Cavill’s performance in the movie is the one element we all agreed worked splendidly. Otherwise we differed in our assessments, although it’s clear I liked it more than Linda, who liked slightly more than half of it, and more than Steven, who hated it.... which means he still may have appreciated it more than G-Weld, who in various podcast appearances this week has called the film “small” and “evil” and likened it to a Transformers film. I understand why he said that, but that’s still way harsh, guy.
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Crashonda Edwards & Julian Michael Martinez play real-life artists Samella Lewis & John Biggers.
So I ended up with a few more hundred words of real estate in which to unpack what I consider be the very earnest and honorable Hampton Years' very earnest and honorable shortcomings. And also the rather less honorable shortcoming of my published review, wherein I reported that the artist Elizabeth Catlett, a character in The Hampton Years, is still alive. In fact, Ms. Catlett died last year. I apologize for my stupid, sloppy error.
The inevitable Marc Maron. (Max S. Gerber/courtesy IFC)
You see? I managed to make even my interview with comedian and podcast host Marc Maron mostly about 60-year-old musicians. But we talked about some other stuff, too. That's on Arts Desk today. Maron plays Sixth & I tonight, promoting his new essay collection, Attempting Normal.
In the unlikely event you've nothing better to do on this rainy Friday
afternoon than watch Robert Aubry Davis and Jane Horowitz offer
insightful comments about a couple of current plays while I blink my
eyes and wobble my head around and emit words, then by all means: Gawk
away as we discuss Stupid Fucking Bird and The Hampton Years on Around Town.
Watch Stupid F---ing Bird on PBS.
Watch The Hampton Years on PBS.
ALSO: I reviewed Stupid Fucking Bird in the City Paper this week.
The A-List: Cody Nickell, Kate Eastwood Norris, Kimberly Gilbert and Rick Foucheux in Stupid Fucking Bird.
Of the stage productions that've moved me most in the five years or so that I've been semi-professionally paying attention to theatre in DC, a suspiciously high percentage of those have been directed by Aaron Posner. (His 2009 version of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at the Folger Theatre remains my favorite thing that I've ever seen in a playhouse.)
Posner is the playwright, not the director, of Stupid Fucking Bird, his-flippant-but-faithful rejiggering of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull, which opened at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company this weekend. (Woolly Mammoth founder Howard Shalwitz is its director.) The result is pretty goddamn delightful, as I aver in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.
I wish I'd taken my socks off before the photographer got there.
Great Scott! I like attention as much as anybody but I do wish that one of the roughly 170 pieces I wrote for the Washington Post between 2006 and 2012 had generated a response like this photo did when it ran on the Post site yesterday. Here I am in uniform (though the cargo shots are not exactly regulation, as has been observed) as Neptune, Roman god of the sea, one-eighth of a clue in the 2013 Post Hunt.
"Earth" was the answer to the riddle the eight of us embodied. The 12,000-plus (says the Post) participants who showed up were instructed, via a sandwich-board sign, to FIND WHAT'S MISSING. A lovely girl from the Post's investigations team named Amy was dressed at the sun, in bright yellow shorts and a top, along with clown-sized yellow sunglasses, and seated in a plastic chair near the western boundary of Pershing Park. One at a time, the rest of us walked -- or stumbled over our diving flippers -- into the crowd to do an "orbit" around her.
Mercury - A fellow dressed as a thermometer, with a giant red sphere suspended via lots of tape over his crotch. I kept thinking of the codpieces worn by Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange.
Venus - My dear pal Liz, wrapped in a sheet, arms tucked inside her T-shirt to approximate the Venus de Milo. Which Liz, with her sense of serene entitlement, already does anyway. Which means we probably didn't need to cover her face with toxic white paint to sell the illusion, but I'm glad I got to do that nonetheless.
Mars - Roman god of war, as indicated by his plastic helmet, chest-plate and sword.
Jupiter - My buddy Derek, wearing a pink yarmulke and brown trousers, and exclaiming "Oy vey!" with a decidedly un-semitic fervor each time he missed a (pretend) golf shot with his (real) putter. A Jew-putter, do you see?
Look, you: The guys who wrote this puzzle, Dave Barry, Tom Schroder and Gene Weingarten, have at least three Pulizers among them. What do you want me to say? Derek also MacGuyvered together the box-top and tree-branch trident I carry in the photo after the prop promised by Post Hunt organizers failed to materialize.
Saturn - My friend Alexis, who blew both hips out hula-hooping around the square all afternoon to depict the rings of Saturn. She'll never walk again. The Washington Post Company thanks her for her efforts and reminds her she is an independent contractor.
Uranus - Annie Mueller, long-suffering housemate of my friend Rachel, who roped all of us into this, wearing a gigantic, strap-on butt with backpack straps.
Neptune - Hi! My Getty image is now available in a variety of sizes, formats and licensing options.
Prices start at Really?! and go as high as You Must Be Fucking Kidding Me. I am entitled to a royalty of 0.00% of all sales, so please give generously. My eyes are up here, by the way. Jerk.
