The 18th annual New York International Fringe Festival runs Friday, August 8th through Sunday, August 24th, 2014, with some 75,000 theatergoers expected for more than 200 shows.

For more about the Fringe, read my article on Howlround: The Seven Secret Ingredients of The New York International Fringe Festival , where I talk about the seven main genres in the Fringe: Yes, campy parodies a la Urinetown, but also:

non-traditional venues
solo shows
serious drama
fresh out of college
fresh takes on classics
performance art and international avant-garde

Here is a glimpse at a handful of them presented at a press preview this week:

The Imbible: A Spirited History of Drinking, which will be presented at COW (21 Clinton Street). Anthony Caporale for a boozy romp through the history of alcohol. Anthony Caporale offers a history of alcohol, and his fellow cast members make it — and serve it. (Yes, they have a license for this.)

Stand-up comic Joel Creasey is a hot commodity in Australia. He comes to the U.S. with “Rock God,” presented at the Players Theater (115 MacDougal Street.)

Fatty Fatty No Friends is being presented at the Flamboyan Theater at the Clemente (107 Suffolk Street.) Here is how the producers describe their show: “As the fattest kid in school, Tommy lives a lonely, living nightmare. When the skinny kids’ taunting goes too far, Tommy takes revenge without amends. A dark spoken-word musical diving into the lunchtime of life, where bullies are delicious.”

Dust Can’t Kill Me, presented at Theatre 80 (80 St. Marks Place), is an original “Dust Bowl musical” put together by a group of undergraduates at Yale. “A ragtag group of wanderers heed a prophet’s advice to embark on a journey that is a tall tale, a ghost story, and a quasi-apocalyptic parable.”

Urban Momfare, at Theatre 80, sounds like an unsentimental musical: “Why don’t we ever hear songs about moms not actually liking their kids? This romp through motherhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side spans 17 years: “Music For Gifted and Talented Babies” to bra straps and Bellinis. Sling on your stilettos! ”

A few seconds with the Marx Brothers from I’ll Say She Is, “the first revival EVER of the Marx Brothers’ 90 year old first Broadway show, the only one of the team’s stage vehicles never to have been filmed.”