Early Harvest

variety show

As with all the best crops, arts in the summer arrive in a glut. So, before the Fringe arrives with its baskets of ripe plums and rotten tomatoes, this week you're (unofficially) treated to a handful of cherry-picked acts. Victor Fiorillo has helped assemble eight of the most game performers "doing some very wacky things." Billy Blaise Dufala presents beatbox woodwind, Aqua Teen Hunger Force illustrator Erik Horowitz shows his cartoons, and local trapezist Janette Hough Fertig will either take to the small skies under the bar's low ceilings or choose to show an earthbound piece in which, according to Fiorillo, she "gets stuffed on Burger King and then births strange objects." But — because all the show, called Binge, shares with that other fest is a rhyming name — will this year begin a custom of spoofing the main event? Well, first off, this is its one and only year (organizers Fiorillo and Devin Williams say), and secondly, Fiorillo did the decent thing and asked Fringe program director Deb Block for her OK. They're planning big things for this fall — including a possible Super Mecca Kerry-oke Smackdown featuring local politicians this October — and, as Fiorillo puts it, they "don't need any more enemies."

Binge Festival, Fri, Aug. 13, 10 p.m., $7-$10, Tritone, 1508 South St., 215-545-0745.

—Juliet Fletcher