Danny Pintauro right on the beat as Allen Ginsberg

According to The New York Times, this year's New York International Fringe Festival is right on tempo with Beat, a "captivating" new play celebrating gay poet Allen Ginsberg and his circle--the klatch of Columbia University students who migrated from New York to San Francisco and helped to shape the revolutionary flavor of the 1960s, including the era's greater openness to gay love.

Applauding Dan Pintauro's performance as Ginsberg, the Times notes: "Pintauro looks nothing like him. But he infuses his performance with the naive, teddy bear quality that Ginsberg used to disarm his critics, and a result is a portrayal that captures the essential character of the man."

In the style of Moisés Kaufman's Gross Indecency, which recounts the trials of Oscar Wilde, Beat quotes from Ginsberg's correspondence as well as newspaper stories of the period and transcripts from Ginsberg's obscenity trial for his notorious poem Howl. Written and directed by newcomer Kelly Groves, Beat will be staged at the Culture Project in SoHo on Thursday at 4:45 p.m., Friday at 8:45 p.m., and Saturday at 4 p.m.