20 stories by "Amy Couchoud"
Fringe is usually filled with scrappy fledging companies of artists banding together in the hopes of making some theatre magic on zero budget, a wing and a prayer. But, every once in while t…
Lindsey is in love with a rock. Yes, an actual rock. More specifically, a rock that's made up of many other rocks encased in concrete. Yes, actually in love. As she says herself while gently…
Prior to the start of MasterMimes: The Show, a man and a woman are sleeping on the floor. Every few minutes, an alarm clock goes off and the woman hits snooze with ever increasing annoyance.…
"Jewish Christmas trees don't have stars!" Or at least they don't according to Boo Levy, one of the matriarchs of the affluent southern Jewish Freitag-Levy household where the family has bar…
Full disclosure: I have spent most of the last decade as a teacher, immersed in the world of autobiographical storytellin . I work with my students to become less "literary" and more "con…
What is truth? It's a big question to explore in 50 minutes, but Agora Dance's The Kind of Thing That Would Happen attempts to do exactly that. The result is a beautifully executed, if overl…
An autobiographical one-man show about performing a different autobiographical one-man show? It sounds like the ultimate Fringe Festival cliché. But despite its conceit, David Kleinberg's R…
How do you know the difference between a story and a lie? According to British spoken word artist Polarbear (aka Steven Camden), a lie is selfish, but a story is a gift. If that is the case,…
On November 6, 1963, 17-year-old Laura Welch (future First Lady Laura Bush) was driving down a dark road on her way to the movies when she failed to heed a stop sign, causing a car ac…
You have likely encountered Doubt: A Parable before. Whether it be through the Tony Award-winning original Broadway production, the Pulitzer Prize-winning script, the Academy Award-nomina…
‘Tis the season to think about love, and whether you've got the "Dirty No-Gooder Blues," are "Taking a Chance on Love" or you're "Just a Lucky So-and-So" there's a song that will speak…
In a season full of holiday spectacle, the rarely performed The Second Shepherds' Play stands out for its sweet simplicity. With only a small three-piece band of expert musicians and modest,…
When a garden is neglected "you clear away the dead parts / so the tender buds can form," sings the character Dickon at the beginning of Act 2 of The Secret Garden. That's exactly what…
Rameau's Nephew is a stage adaption of enlightenment era philosopher Denis Diderot's fictional dialogue between a moralistic philosopher ("I") and his foil, the greedy and hedonistic nephew …
Washington, DC, 2:16 AM, a car bomb goes off in a supposed terrorist attack. The suspect is a Middle Eastern-looking man with a beard. Amor is a Washingtonian of Middle Eastern descent with …
Duke Ellington said that jazz is "not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion." In the biographical drama Paul Gonsalves on the Road, Gonsalves, legendary jazz saxophonist and longtim…
When we meet Mary Toft at the beginning of How to Give Birth to a Rabbit, she sings "I'd give my blood" to rise above her life of poverty and indigence, and that's exactly what she does. Rab…
I was rooting for Krish Mohan. The odds were stacked against him at the Saturday afternoon performance of An Indian Comedian: How Not To Fit In. A block-long power outage rendered the upstai…
Think Fringe isn’t family friendly? It is! Exhibit A: Barry Beaver's Adventures in Happy Valley – LaGoDi Foundation for the Arts’ musical storybook romp. Geared towar…
Near the beginning of Rain follows the Plow: A Dust Opera the matriarch of the Walker family describes the many hardships of life on the plains in the 1930's. "But the sky, the impossible sk…
