Fringe World: I wrote the cover story for this week's Washington City Paper

I'm a few days late posting this. For the past two weeks I've been taking part in the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Critics Institute — a professional boot camp for early-to-mid-career critics under the command of Chris Jones, the Chicago Tribune's chief theatre critic and a fine teacher of the craft of criticism, too. It's been an intense couple of weeks of living in a spartan dormitory with a roommate, and hitting overnight deadlines almost every night. I'll write about that a bit more once I've recovered.

In the midst of all that, I had to finish the cover story in this week's Washington City Paper, about the 10th Capital Fringe Festival, which kicked off Thursday evening. I hope you will find it answers all your most pressing questions about Capital Fringe and co-founder/Executive Director Julianne Brienza's plan to take it higher. I mean that literally. She wants to add three floors to the building she bought last year in Trinidad on Florida Ave. NE.

I wrote a prior cover story about CapFringe in 2010, and I covered the festival every summer from 2010 through 2014 as the editor of Fringeworthy (née Fringe & Purge),  WCP's dedicated all-things-Fringe blog. This year, I decided I'd rather attend the NCI than run the blog a sixth consecutive time. I've handed off the keys to a very capable successor.

Pop Culture Happy Hour, Small Batch Ed. — Terminator: Genisys (sic)

Arnold Schwarzenegger as a long-serving T-800. (Paramount/Skydance)

 Skyped in from the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in beautiful New London, CT to dissect Terminator: Genisys (sic) — the underwhelming reboot of/fourth sequel to one of my favorite movies — with Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon. While I was taking in this movie in the “Luxury Seating” equipped Waterford 9 Cinemas, several of my fellow Critic Fellows, all ladies, were next door enjoying Magic Mike XXL. My proposal for a double feature was summarily rejected.

The Future Is Not Set: A Terminator Dossier

A T-800 goes shopping for clothes at the Griffith Park Observatory, May 12, 1984.

I haven't seen the by-all-accounts underwhelming Terminator: Genisys yet, because I've been busy being a "Critic Fellow" at the one-of-a-kind Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center in the wilds of Connecticut. But I did indulge in some quippy dramaturgy on the wandering-ronin Terminator franchise, for NPR.

Audrey and Bill, reviewed for Washington Post Book World

Audrey Hepburn & William Holden in a promotional image for Billy Wilder's Sabrina, 1954.

I reviewed Audrey and Bill: A Romantic Biography of Audrey Hepburn and William Holden, a crummy book about the two stars' affair during the making of Sabrina in the early 50s, for The Washington Post. If decades-old Hollywood gossip is your bag, I recommend Karina Longworth's podcast You Must Remember This. The author of Audrey and Bill, Edward Z. Epstein, is a former publicist; Longworth is film critic and historian. It's a crucial difference. 

UPDATE: Whoops, You Must Remember This already covered Hepburn and Sabrina. I should've checked that. Also, I stumbled upon this 10-year-old Slate piece about Arnold Schwarzenegger's incredibly luxe deal for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, by one Edward Jay Epstein. It's richly reported and has a strong point of view, two qualities Audrey and Bill lacks, in my opinion. Having written for Slate myself, I know that their editors encourage this sharper, more argumentative tone, but even allowing for that, this Schwarzenegger piece and Audrey and Bill still don't read like the work of the same author. Probably because they're not: Edward Jay's site is here; Edward Z.'s is here. But that's still a pretty big coincidence.

Two-and-a-Half Stars: 7 Minutes, reviewed.

Luke Mitchell has a mask and a gun but not much of a plan.

I like Michael Mann and I love Heat in particular, and I love Wes Anderson. But 7 Minutes, a nicely-shot hybrid of Heat and Bottle Rocket, Anderson's debut, is less than the sum of its influences. I reviewed it for The Dissolve.

The Bitch Is, Regrettably, Back: Jurassic World, reviewed.

Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt star in a surpisingly retrograde blockbuster. (Universal)

Stuff I Ran Out of Space to Say in My Just-Posted NPR Review of Jurassic World:

1) Yeah, the sense of wonder that still comes through in Steven Spielberg's 1993 original comes back, fleetingly, a little, just in the opening act. I think that's mostly down to Michael Giacchino's score, which interpolates John Williams' stately, noble Jurassic Park theme the way John Ottman's music for Superman Returns interpolated Williams' march from Superman. 

1a)  I haven't been able to stop humming Williams' "Theme from Jurassic Park" in the two days since I saw the new one. Giacchino is the busiest and probably best composer in the blockbuster game these days, as ubiquitous as Williams was 30 or 25 years ago. But I can't recall any of his original Jurassic World music.

2) This movie, while enjoyable, is even better if you imagine there are subtitles under all the shots of dinosaurs' faces, like when dog and bear confer in Anchorman.

3) The great Judy Greer was at least allowed to pick her butt and groom herself in last year's terrific Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. (She played an ape, okay? Calm down.) In Jurassic World, pretty much all she gets to do is cry into her iPhone, though I do like the part where she tells her two boys, whom she's packing off to visit their aunt at Jurassic World, "If something chases you, run."

4) The only Jurassic Park sequel set on Isla Nublar, the fictional island off of Costa Rica where the original movie took place, Jurassic World tells us several times that 20,000 people are onsite, most of them admission-paying visitors to the park. That's an interesting new wrinkle — remember the subplot in Jaws about how the mayor didn't want to close the beach on Amityville because its merchants need the tourist income from Independence Day weekend to survive? But save for its one The Birds-homage aerial assault, Jurassic World sort of remembers these many hot, thirsty, bored, hungry, eventually terrified masses and forgets them again at its convenience. In a real crisis situation requiring these people to sit still and do as they're told, they would likely pose as much a threat as those hungry, hungry dinosaurs.

5) Jurassic World was written by Rise and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes screenwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, though they were subsequently rewritten by director Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly, who wrote Trevorrow's one prior feature, Safety Not Guaranteed. All of the films I've named in this paragraph are better than Jurassic World.

Again, my review, absent these items, is here.

A-choo: The Tale of the Allergist's Wife, reviewed.

Paul Morella, Lise Bruneau, Susan Rome, and Barbara Rappaport (Theater J).

My review of Theater J's updated production of drag-playwright Charles Busch's 2000 mainstream breakthrough The Tale of the Allergist's Wife is in today's Washington City Paper. God bless you.

In the Flesh: Zombie: The American and NSFW, reviewed.

Sean Meehan, James Seol, and Tim Getman in Zombie: The American (Stan Barouh).

Two satires, each alike in indignation. My reviews of Robert O'Hara's world premiere Zombie: The American at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Lucy Kirkwood's 2012 NSFW at Round House Theatre are in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis.