'Pepe' at Home at Fringe Fest
Tim (Cyle Durkee, right) embraces a horrified Pepe the monkey (Rick Hammerly) in a rehearsal of "Pepe! The Mail Order Monkey Musical."
(By Tom Kochel)
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It's two weeks before opening night, and the cast of the Capital Fringe Festival's "Pepe! The Mail Order Monkey Musical" is still making do without a finished set, costumes or props. Worse, Rick Hammerly, the Helen Hayes Award-winning actor who plays the titular primate, is out sick, having been replaced -- for the show-stopping number that includes the lament "What Am I Doing in This Box?" -- by musical director Brian Wilbur Grundstrom and -- for his poop-flinging escape from the aforementioned shipping container -- by co-choreographer Nora Lockshin.
Nevertheless, the music and vocal performances are almost shockingly polished, and not only for a Fringe show, which this most definitely is.
Based on the real-life experience of local glass artist Tim Tate -- who as a 9-year-old in the late 1960s sent $19.95 for a live squirrel monkey, only to have the animal wreak havoc on his mother's bridge club -- the musical by filmmaker Jon Gann, founder of the D.C. Film Alliance, is an at-times-funny, at-times-poignant meditation on freedom. It also has been given a somewhat happier ending than the actual story. The show may be all Gann's, as Tate is quick to point out, but that doesn't stop Tate from providing a quick promotional blurb. "It's 'Les Miz,' " he says, "with a monkey."
-- Michael O'Sullivan
PEPE! THE MAIL ORDER MONKEY MUSICAL Wednesday and July 18, 22, 24 and 25. Mount Vernon Place United Methodist Church, 900 Massachusetts Ave. NW.
