Bob Ashby
127 posts — page 3 of 3
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Draupadi’s Arranged Marriage’
Drawn from an episode in the Sanskrit epic The Mahabharata, Draupadi’s Arranged Marriage imagines the protagonist as a woman of modern feminist views faced with a polyandrous arranged marriage to five...
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Review: ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ by The Hypocrites at Olney Theatre Center
Once upon a time, Gilbert and Sullivan staging was – there is no other word for it – stodgy. The D’Oyly Carte opera company dominated G&S performance from the late 19th century until its 1982 death...
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Lives Left Behind’
In The Lives Left Behind, the Silver Finch Arts Collective presents four short, one-act, chamber operas, each by a different composer and librettist. The instrumental music for all four pieces is...
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Aphrodite’s Refugees’
Monica Dionysiou gives audiences a bravura hour of solo storytelling in her Aphrodite’s Refugees, which is based on the experiences of her family during the warfare that consumed Cyprus in the...
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘1 2 3: a play about abandonment and ballroom dancing’
What becomes of the children of famous (or notorious) people later in their lives is fertile ground for fiction as well as documentary storytellers. One of the best of the genre is E.L. Doctorow’s...
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Review: ‘Guerrilla Theater Works 3: A New Nation’ by Convergence Theatre
Sunday morning, before I drove from my home in Western Maryland to see Convergence Theatre’s production of A New Nation, I noted the following in a letter to the editor of my local newspaper: “There...
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘America’s Wives’
A main point of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is that the oppression of people of color in the U.S. cannot be explained as a matter of mean-spirited bigots lashing out at African-Americans or...
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2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Andromeda Breaks’
Andromeda Breaks, written by Stephen Spotswood and directed by Nick Martin, takes the initial form of a police interrogation. At the outset, Andromeda (Billie Krishawn) sits handcuffed to a metal...
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Review: ‘Secrets of the Universe (And Other Songs)’ at the Hub Theatre
Secrets of the Universe (And Other Songs), a new play by Marc Acito having its world premiere at the Hub Theatre in Fairfax, explores the friendship between two 20th century greats in very different...
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Review: ‘On the Town’ at Olney Theatre Center
D.C.–area audiences are notorious for their too-free-and-easy awarding of standing ovations. But last night’s prolonged, enthusiastic, standing, whooping, hollering, response to Olney Theatre’s...
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Review: ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ at the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center advertises its Broadway Center Stage series as presenting shows in a “semi-staged concert format.” For Frank Loesser’s 1961 satire of mid-20th century New York corporate life, How...
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Review: ‘Bad Jews’ at NextStop Theatre
What must their mothers have been like? Certainly, cousins Daphna and Liam (Sophie Schulman and Noah Schaefer), the antagonists in Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews, now playing at Herndon’s NextStop Theater –...
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Review: ‘A View from the Bridge’ at Maryland Ensemble Theatre
The 1950s Brooklyn waterfront setting of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge has long since disappeared. The container revolution, beginning in the 1970s, ended forever the traditional...
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Review: ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’ at Other Voices Theatre
World’s Fairs – those gaudy showcases of civic and national pride, corporate promotion, new technology, consumerism, over-the-top temporary architecture, sideshow entertainment, and an occasional...
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Review: ‘Gypsy’ at the Cumberland Theatre
The original full title of the show now playing at the Cumberland Theatre was Gypsy: A Musical Fable. Emphasize that final word. Gypsy Rose Lee was none too particular about the facts of her life in...
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Review: ‘The Crucible’ at Olney Theatre Center
Fanaticism grows in a society fractured along fault lines of political and religious authority, property, status, gender, generational change, and belief, creating a fertile climate for persecution....
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Review: ‘Fly By Night’ at 1st Stage
Recipe for a vexing evening of musical theater: combine cuteness, sweetness, quirkiness, clever and funny dialogue, and a sprinkling of amusing and melodic songs. Add a heavy dose of sentimentality....
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Review: ‘Sweeney Todd’ by The Arlington Players
Stephen Sondheim himself felt some uncertainty in categorizing Sweeney Todd, the 1979 show that many regard as the masterpiece of his long and spectacular career. In his annotated book of lyrics,...
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Review: ‘The Front Page’ by Providence Players
There are few perfect things in life, let alone in theater. But Providence Players’ The Front Page comes darn close. Every aspect of the production is first-rate. The newspaper world created for this...
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Review: ‘Roz and Ray’ at Theater J
Fierce. No word short of that can fairly describe the characters’ commitment to their consuming passions, and the actors’ commitment to their roles, in Theater J’s harrowing production of Karen...
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Review: ‘Rapture, Blister, Burn’ at Maryland Ensemble Theatre
There are potholes in the road not taken. So discover many of the characters in Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn, now being presented by the Maryland Ensemble Theater (MET) in Frederick,...
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Review: ‘Death by Design’ at Aldersgate Church Community Theater
“There is nothing whatever beneath my exterior.” So proclaims a character in Death by Design, now playing at the Aldersgate Church Community Theater (ACCT) in Alexandria. How right he is, not only for...
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Review: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ at Other Voices Theatre
Frederick’s Other Voices Theatre puts a very large cast and a complex technical scheme to excellent use in its production of the 1971 Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice rock operetta Jesus Christ Superstar....
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Review: ‘Fool for Love’ at the Cumberland Theatre
The theme of a man and a woman who can’t live without each other and can’t live with each other is as old as theater. Often enough it has been played for comedy, as in the couples in Noel Coward’s...
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Review: ‘Avenue Q’ at Workhouse Arts Center
The audience for Workhouse Theater’s production of Avenue Q (music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Mark, book by Jeff Whitty), loved every minute. And what’s not to love? The 2003 Tony...
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Review: ‘Of Mice and Men’ at Maryland Entertainment Group
An apt subtitle for Of Mice and Men, adapted from the 1937 novella by John Steinbeck, might be “the futility of hope.” In the small, corrosively lonely, universe of a California ranch during the Great...
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Review: ‘The Audience’ at Little Theatre of Alexandria
Attention Anglophiles: If you loved The Queen, and if you avidly follow The Crown on Netflix, then by all means, join the audience for The Audience at the Little Theatre of Alexandria (LTA). All three...
