Bob Ashby

There’s a new ‘Pretty Woman’ in town: Q&A with Olivia Valli

The rising star who plays Vivian tells how the musical has been revised since its Broadway run and how her character will be different from the movie.

Come for the songs in ‘Beautiful: The Carole King Musical’ at KenCen

And what songs they are! — classics on a par with anything in the American Songbook.

August Wilson’s personal passion takes center stage at Avant Bard

A laudable performance of the renowned playwright’s autobiographical ‘How I Learned What I Learned.’

‘Tis the season to be screwball at Best Medicine Rep’s ‘On the Farce Day of Christmas’

Ken Levine’s comedy has the virtue of not being a holiday warhorse.

Without reservation, ‘Fully Committed’ at NextStop is a delight

The script gives an actor the opportunity for a sparkling display of comic virtuosity, and Jaclyn Young takes full advantage.

A fanciful and delightful ‘Cymbeline’ from Rude Mechanicals

Emphasizing the play’s fairy tale elements, Director Erin Nealer steered actors toward a wry, broadly comic style that regularly drew well-earned laughs.

A top-notch ‘On the Town’ from Rockville Musical Theatre

The show’s sights are fixed on the joy of living this day — joy that the production gives the audience abundantly.

Rooftop Productions takes a stab at Sondheim’s ‘Sweeney Todd’

A worthwhile engagement with the glories and complexities of the “dark operetta.”

Little Theater of Alexandria has a winning thriller in ‘Wait Until Dark’

Good acting and taut direction in an enjoyably suspenseful evening of theater.

‘Where We Belong’ to play at Baltimore Center Stage prior to U.S. tour

Performing solo, Madeline Sayet personifies her Mohegan heritage of women as powerful carriers of their culture.

The future of opera in the time of pandemic: A Q&A with Adam Turner

I spoke with Adam Turner, Artistic Director of the Virginia Opera, on Tuesday, September 15, about how a regional opera company weathers COVID and the shutdown of most live performance. Virginia Opera...

Virginia Opera is all about Stayin’ Alive

With live performances shut down since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists unemployed, and income streams disrupted, performing arts organizations continue to face the hardest of times....

A top-notch storyteller tells ‘Stories I May Not Tell’ at Best Medicine Rep

Theaters have gone dark during the pandemic, with little certainty about when or whether actors and audiences can again gather in the same space to tell and listen to stories that illuminate our...

Small-town redemption still resonates in Rockville Little Theatre’s ‘The Spitfire Grill’

The Spitfire Grill was in Off-Broadway previews on 9/11. In part because its heartwarming, American roots/small-town spirited songs and characters struck a powerful emotional chord in the days that...

Washington National Opera stages a vocally stirring, visually arresting ‘Samson and Delilah’ at The Kennedy Center

Tales of wars, slaughters, betrayals, competing tribes and religions, and a few dominant women make the Book of Judges one of the more colorful segments of the Hebrew Bible. Camille Saint-Saëns and...

‘Ordinary Days’ at NextStop Theatre: Ah, to be young and tuneful in New York City

Adam Gwon’s 2009 show Ordinary Days could serve as the prototypical Off-Broadway chamber musical: four young characters navigate the Big City in search of their lives, in 19 songs over 80 minutes. The...

‘Cinderella’ (La Cenerentola): Well-sung Rossini at Virginia Opera

Spoiler alert: Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after. Of course, since Virginia Opera, like all opera companies of any size, prints a detailed synopsis in the program each patron receives,...

‘The 39 Steps’ at Constellation: a walk on the hilarious side

For an evening of dry wit and sophisticated, subtle humor, make your way…Oh forget it. Just come to Constellation Theatre’s The 39 Steps for a couple hours of cheesy lines, old situations, new...

A holy night: Folger Consort performs ‘Palestrina’s Perfect Art’ at the National Cathedral

What would it have felt like, I’ve sometimes wondered, to listen, in sublime surroundings, to sounds conveying the deepest devotions of Christian belief, long before the “melancholy, long, withdrawing...

The political becomes personal in Olney Theatre Center’s ‘Miss You Like Hell’

At Friendship Park, on the US-Mexico border just south of San Diego, from 10 am to 2 pm Saturdays and Sundays, 10 people at a time on the US side can see, and talk through a fence, with friends or...

Carlo vs. Carlo clash in Best Medicine Rep’s ‘Comedy of Venice’

John Morogiello’s new “based-on-a true-story” play Comedy of Venice, having its debut performance at Gaithersburg’s Best Medicine Rep, centers on a feud between two 18th-century Venetian playwrights....

‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ at Arena: women fighting their forever war

You will not this season see a more beautiful, emotionally wrenching portrayal of profound love than in Arena Stage’s production of Ursula Rani Sarma’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. Based on Khaled...

Mother and son fight to stay afloat in ‘Pipeline’ at Studio Theatre

The pipeline in the title of Dominique Morisseau’s play is the “school-to-prison pipeline” affecting young African-American men. Fueled, as Studio Theatre’s dramaturgical notes explain, by a...

Rueful romance in ‘Now and Then’ by Upcounty Theatre

Sean Grennan’s Now and Then, receiving its East Coast premiere courtesy of Upcounty Theatre in Germantown, Maryland, deals in regret anticipated and recollected, and inquires about the possibility of...

A Black boxing champion battles racism in ‘The Royale’ at 1st Stage

Black early 20th-century celebrity heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson has had as irresistible a pull on subsequent playwrights and filmmakers as he did on the public of his day. Already the...

A Powerhouse Performance of Handel’s Messiah by NSO at The Kennedy Center

At the outset, I will confess a bias: I much prefer listening to baroque pieces played in the style, and on the scale, of the time in which they were composed. Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah was...

A ‘My Fair Lady’ for today at the Kennedy Center

The character arc that carries Lerner and Loewe’s classic My Fair Lady belongs to Eliza Doolittle, as she rises from flower girl at Covent Garden to the belle of the embassy ball, from feral street...

Scena Theatre’s ‘The Dead’ presents quiet desperation at Christmastime

Based on a renowned short story by James Joyce, The Dead, now being presented by Scena Theatre, is a slice of the lives of polite, quiet desperation lived by genteel middle-class Dubliners in the...

Mosaic Theater’s ‘Eureka Day’ puts immunization in the hot seat

In Samoa, 68 people – mostly children – have died of measles in recent weeks, victims of an abysmally low immunization rate resulting, in significant part, from misinformation spread on social media...

IN Series’ ‘L’Enfance du Christ’ follows the Holy Family’s journey as refugees

Hector Berlioz’s mid-19th-century L’Enfance du Christ is not quite an oratorio in the most familiar sense of that term. Nor is it quite an opera. Written piecemeal over many years by a composer who...

A well-conceived ‘Curious Incident’ at Round House Theatre

“Curious” is the operative word in the title of Simon Stephens’ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, now playing at the Round House Theatre. The protagonist, teenager Christopher Boone...

Venus Theatre’s ‘The Powers that Be’: fighting the double bind

Venus Theatre’s staff don’t open the house until immediately before The Powers that Be begins, presenting audience members, as they take their seats, with the evening’s most arresting image,...

Virginia Opera’s ‘Il Postino’: no “scary modern music” here

Virginia Opera’s artistic director Adam Turner, in his program note for contemporary composer Daniel Catán’s Il Postino, hastens to assure audiences that the company is working to dispel myths about...

‘Sweat’ at Silver Spring Stage: a precise portrayal of workers caught in a rip tide

I’ve never been to Reading, PA, the location of Lynn Nottage’s searing 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, now playing at Silver Spring Stage, but my life has been bracketed by living in or near...

Mosaic’s ‘Theory:’ an embodiment of ‘wokeness’ besieged

Canadian playwright Norman Yeung’s Theory, in its American premiere at Mosaic Theater, seeks to be, in the words of Mosaic’s press release, “a hot button play for our digital moment.” Yeung packs a...

Murder most melodic in Reston’s ‘Gentleman’s Guide’

Getting killed multiple times in a single production can be great fun (my personal best is three). In Reston Community Players’ (RCP) A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Patrick Graham – playing...

Thoughtful ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ at Arena Stage

How do you put a human face on a difficult, complex subject the natural habitat of which may more likely be a law review article than a stage? Such is playwright Sharyn Rothstein’s task in Right to be...

Constellation’s ‘Little Shop’ puts the horror back in horticulture

From its beginnings as a very low-budget 1960 Roger Corman B-picture horror flick (a young Jack Nicholson had a minor role), Little Shop of Horrors has been an irresistible salad of corrupted...

Review: ‘Disenchanted’ at Creative Cauldron

Snow White is bossy. Cinderella is a ditzy dim bulb. Sleeping Beauty not only sleeps a lot but snores. Belle is going nuts from talking to inanimate objects. Mulan likes girls. Just what kind of...

Review: ‘The Finger’ at Venus Theater

Ambiguous loss that binds two people together while pushing them apart. Incompatible paths of grief that alienate each other’s only source of connection. The dominating presence of someone who is...

Review: ‘Cats’ at The Kennedy Center Opera House

Andrew Lloyd Webber catapulted to unprecedented West End and Broadway success with his musical extravaganza Cats, based on a 1939 collection of light verse by the otherwise modernist poet, T.S. Eliot....

Review: ‘Beauty and the Beast’ by The Arlington Players

After a highly successful animated film, a long-running Broadway show, a live-action movie version, various spin-offs, and innumerable theme park, cruise ship, and school productions, the Disney...

Review: ‘Helen on Wheels’ at Best Medicine Rep

The central character in Best Medicine Rep’s (BMR) DC-area premiere of Cricket Daniel’s Helen on Wheels, Helen Wheeler (Liz Weber), is a 74-year old Oklahoma widow full of vim, vigor, and strong drink...

Review: ‘Legally Blonde’ at the Keegan Theatre

In this summer of our discontent – what with unchecked climate change, racist politics, and mass murders – a bit of cheer in the form of a frothy tale of a privileged white girl who, through dint of...

Review: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ by Baltimore Shakespeare Factory

Baltimore Shakespeare Factory’s (BSF) production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Tom Delise, delivers the “merry” promised in the title. The wives – Alice Ford (Emily Classen) and Margaret...

Review: ‘The Few’ by Unexpected Stage Company

The American interior West has long been a favored setting for stories about loneliness. The visual emptiness of vast open spaces – think of your favorite John Ford film – and the emotional distance...

Review: ‘American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables’ by The Hub Theatre

Playwright Sam Hamashima is described in his program bio as working in the “collision between his queer identity and his Japanese-American identity.” In American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables,...

Review: ‘A Welcome Guest: A Psychotic Fairy Tale’ by Michael Weller at Contemporary American Theater Festival

Eat your heart out, Christmas Carol. Hang up your dancing shoes, Nutcracker. Change the channel on reruns of It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s Christmas in July in Shepherdstown, as the Contemporary...

Review: ‘Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son’ by Dael Orlandersmith and Antonio Edwards Suarez at Contemporary American Theater Festival

The Antonio in question is Antonio Edwards Suarez, the writer (with Dael Orlandersmith) and actor in this one-man autobiographical piece, part of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in...

Review: ‘My Lord, What a Night’ by Deborah Brevoort at Contemporary American Theater Festival

My Lord, What a Night, a new play by Deborah Brevoort at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, explores the relationship between two 20th-century greats in very...