'Glory Days': Polished to a High Sheen

As it wraps its second year, could the Capital Fringe Festival already be losing its baby fat? You might think so if you take in the trim, taut, seductively professional concert reading of Signature Theatre's new musical "Glory Days."

Giving its final performance tonight at the Signature's Arlington venue, "Glory Days" is an amiable, if not earth-shaking, portrait of four high school buddies who reunite a year after graduation and find they've drifted apart.

More specifically, as we learn from the composer/lyricist Nick Blaemire's pop-informed score -- and from James Gardiner's book, which revels in guy-talk -- the four have grown up. Andy (Charlie Brady) has "matured" into a sex-obsessed frat boy. Jack (Jesse JP Johnson) has discovered he's gay. And Skip (Adam Halpin) and Will (Steven Booth) have acquired political and artistic awareness, respectively.

Such plotting seems reductionist, and audience members old enough to buy booze might find the show's central revelation -- that people change with time -- unsurprising. Yet in the hands of these actors -- veterans of national tours and the like -- the characters become funny and distinctive.

The music, in addition, can be soaringly tuneful, evoking a slightly blander version of Jason Robert Brown, with a touch of Daniel Powter (Blaemire, 22, grew up in the Washington area.) With pianist Mark Christine providing bracing accompaniment, the 90-minute production glides along at a brisk pace, under Signature Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer.

A concert reading, maybe, but it's so expertly calibrated -- so tasteful! so well-rehearsed! so Equity-endorsed! -- that it seems positively un-Fringe-y. And this weekend-long foray is merely the chrysalis stage for "Glory Days": Signature will mount a world premiere production in January.

It might seem a worrying sign that the Fringe has become a training-wheels moment for high-profile shows by established local theaters. But there's lots of room for the scrappy, oddball, "what-were-they-thinking?" productions that give a Fringe lineup its flair.

Competing with "Glory Boys" tonight, for instance, will be "Hamlet? That Is the Question," an hour-long comic deconstruction by Infinite Stage. Considering that Washington has witnessed countless versions of Shakespeare's most famous tragedy this year (or so it seems), it's either a brave or a foolhardy venture.

A viewing of the production, created in part by actor improvisation, inclines one toward the latter perspective. The show begins with a tired jape at Elsinore's high mortality rate: When the audience walks into Woolly Mammoth's Melton Rehearsal Hall, the stage is already littered with fallen bodies -- all wearing red clown noses. Soon the corpses jolt to life and start enacting "Hamlet" in a nonlinear and deliberately unpolished manner, like children playing house.

The tragedy's sensational elements surge to the fore: The performers repeat lines such as the Ghost's "O, horrible!" and the fencing match's "A very palpable hit" over and over. After one character's death, a section of stage is fenced off with red crime-scene tape. The props and interspersed pop tunes serve as further tools of irony: At one point, Ophelia (Allison Schubert) walks around throwing flour into the air in lieu of distributing rosemary and rue; another sequence features a rendition of Elton John's "Candle in the Wind."

If "Hamlet?" exemplifies the Fringe tendency to overdose on postmodern waggishness, Karma Mayet Johnson's "Indigo: A Blues Opera" (at the Warehouse) shows there's also scope for heartfelt sincerity. This afternoon will see the final performance of this glacially slow tale of a love affair between two female slaves in the antebellum South.

The program describes the piece as a "multimedia choreo-drama," but that term is perhaps too grandiose: The multimedia element is a backdrop screen that catches designer Torkwase Dyson's mottled-twilight projections and looming shadows of the performers -- principally Ashley Brockington as the bold tomboyish LuBell, and writer/composer/director Johnson as the timid Eliza. Now and then, the duo light into moodily ecstatic dance, with swinging pelvises, writhing arms and low centers of gravity. Guitarist Tomás Doncker strums the blues near constantly, providing accompaniment and scenic underscoring.

But the really unusual element of this intimate melodrama is the living forest: a handful of female performers with green skin and matted, twig-bedecked hair who hang out wordlessly and almost motionlessly on stage, looking morosely arboreal. (There are also some blue-skinned figures who presumably represent rivers or swamps.) Were there a Fringe-wide Good Sport Award, this ensemble would win it.

The runners-up would be the audiences who sit through "Indigo," which is nearly 90 minutes but feels much longer. Still, the obvious passion behind the production is impressive. Johnson didn't focus-group her choreo-drama into existence, and she didn't engineer it around a cute title. She had an idiosyncratic vision that she simply had to express.

If it's not to channel such stage-it-or-bust conviction, what is a Fringe Festival for?