David Gerson

Wildly theatrical ‘Swindlers’ opens at Baltimore Center Stage

The actors are all in top form, but we don’t learn enough about their characters to become invested in what happens to them.

Review: ‘Proof’ at Everyman Theatre

No gift comes without a cost. And that lesson courses through every moment of Proof, David Auburn’s very fine Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which is being given a thrilling revival at Everyman Theatre....

Review: ‘Daddy Long Legs’ by Monumental Theatre Company

Sometimes you find a gem in an unlikely place. That happened to me recently at a small state-of-the-art black-box theatre on the campus of a boarding school on a quiet street in Alexandria, Virginia,...

Review: ‘Miss Saigon’ at The Kennedy Center

Miss Saigon is all grown up. Sort of. It’s been almost 30 years since Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s blockbuster opened in London’s West End and took the world by storm. But times have...

Review: ‘King of the Yees’ at Baltimore Center Stage

“You don’t have use? You don’t have power? They will erase you from your own story.” -Larry Yee Lauren Yee has a problem. And it’s kind of a big one. Not Lauren Yee the writer, whose very funny but...

Interview: Artistic Director Sean Elias and Director Brandon Rashad-Butts Discuss ‘Bootycandy,’ Playing June 9-18th at the Baltimore Theatre Project

Robert O’Hara’s Bootycandy opens on June 9, 2017, at Baltimore’s Iron Crow Theatre. This production, a Baltimore premiere and the official show of Baltimore Pride 2017, closes out the largest and most...

Review: ‘Hir’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

I recently came back from London, where I saw the National Theatre’s 25th anniversary production of Tony Kushner’s epic, Angels in America. I thought a lot about that play after seeing Woolly Mammoth...

Review: [title of show] at Fells Point Corner Theatre

When it comes to musical theatre, there are two types of people: those who hate it and those who are obsessed with it. There is no in-between. And those obsessives, those for whom musicals are like...

Review: ‘Los Otros’ #2 at Everyman Theatre

It may be more by chance, rather than design, that Everyman Theatre’s production of Los Otros, with book and lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh and music by Michael John LaChiusa, takes on an urgent sense of...

Review: ‘Mom Baby God’ at Single Carrot Theatre

Sinister things are lurking just below the surface at the “2018 Students for Life Conference” in Washington, DC, which is where Madeline Burrows’ disturbing solo show Mom Baby God, about the youth...

Review: ‘Blackbird’ at Fells Point Corner Theatre

When Una, the 27 year-old British woman at the center of David Harrower’s startling and complex play Blackbird, tells a man named Ray, 15 years her senior, that he made her into a ghost, there is no...

Review: ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ at Iron Crow Theatre

“Are you a virgin?” You may be asked this by one of the cast members as you enter the theatre at The Motor House to see Iron Crow Theatre’s raucous and riotous production of The Rocky Horror Show, the...

Review: ‘The Wild Party’ at Iron Crow Theatre

Queenie was a blonde and her age stood still, And she danced twice a day in vaudeville. So begins Joseph Moncure March’s 1928 narrative poem “The Wild Party” about a group of show people and the...

Review #1: ‘Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Let’s just get this out of the way. Jen Silverman’s Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops (its full title is Collective Rage: A Play in Five Boops; In Essence a Queer and Occasionally Hazardous...

Review: ‘Come From Away’ at Ford’s Theatre

Nestled in the northwestern part of the island of Newfoundland, lies the small town of Gander. In 2001, the population of Gander was 9,651. On September 11, 2001, that population increased by over...

Review: ‘Broken Bone Bathtub’ at Submersive Productions

Here’s a tip, the most exclusive performance venue in Baltimore isn’t the Hippodrome or the Power Plant. It’s not Centerstage or Everyman. If you’re able to get in, and I suggest you try, the hottest...

Review: A Fully Staged Reading of ‘My Fair Lady’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

It is not easy to reinvent the wheel let alone attempt it, but that is exactly what the ambitious Annapolis Shakespeare Company has done, with generally fine results, in its fully staged reading of...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘One Mutual Happiness’

As someone who has been crazy enough to produce new work (twice!) in a fringe festival (The New York International Fringe Festival), the amazing thing about these types of events is that they allow...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Barry Beaver’s Adventures in Happy Valley’

Sometimes, what you think you don’t want, is exactly what you need. And sometimes, comfort and joy are found in the unlikeliest of places. After a week which sent shockwaves through the country and...

Review: ‘An Octoroon’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Welcome to playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ world. You’re just living in it. Or, is it, welcome to 19th Century playwright Dion Boucicault’s world and Branden Jacobs- Jenkins is living in it? Or, is...

Review: ‘The Who & the What’ at Round House Theatre

As I was leaving Round House Theatre on opening night of Ayad Akhtar’s The Who & the What, I heard one patron say to another, “Wasn’t that fabulous?” And the response was, “Yes.” I’m not sure what I...

Review: ‘When January Feels Like Summer’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

The weather, like the five characters in Cori Thomas’ tender romantic comedy When January Feels Like Summer, is in crisis. Attribute the unpredictable climate to global warming, but it’s nothing a...

Review: ‘Time Stands Still’ at Fells Point Corner Theatre

Dramaturgical notes in the program tell us that Time Stands Still is “essentially a love story.” But it’s also a play about war. And art. And economics. And politics. And publishing. And privilege....

Review: The Great American Rep: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ at Everyman Theatre

As the centerpiece of its 25th Anniversary Season, Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre has taken on the daunting task of mounting what are arguably the two greatest American plays ever written, Arthur...

Review: ‘The Nether’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Imagine a place where you could be anything you ever dreamed of and do anything you desired in total anonymity and without fear of reprisal or consequence. Imagine the retreat you crave, that you...

Review: ‘Aphorisms on Gender’ by Alice Stanley Presented by Cohesion Theatre Company in Collaboration with Iron Crow Theatre

Literally, an “aphorism” is a short phrase that expresses a truth or astute observation. In Alice Stanley’s brief, but powerful, meditation on gender, they [1] have structured the piece itself as a...

Review: ‘Guards at the Taj’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Although it is never seen, not even a glimpse of one of its four minarets or gleaming domes, the Taj Mahal looms large as a monument of beauty and death as it haunts Rajiv Joseph’s poetic morality...

Review: ‘The 39 Steps’ at Fells Point Corner Theatre and The Collaborative Theatre

It is said that, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Well, the latter is doubly, no, triply, no, quadruply, no, well… you get the idea in Fells Point Corner Theatre and The Collaborative Theatre’s...

‘Year of the Rooster’ at Single Carrot Theatre

For those of you with a penchant for theatre about cockfighting, ‘tis the season indeed for plays on the subject in our fair city of Baltimore. As Fells Point Corner Theater is closing its very fine...

‘Cock (or The Cockfight Play)’ at Fells Point Corner Theatre

In the blood sport known as cockfighting, two roosters are placed in a ring, called a “cockpit,” and fight until one of them dies. The same thing happens, in a metaphorical sense, in Mike Bartlett’s...

‘Titus Andronicus’ at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company

“We are all undone!” a character hysterically cries halfway through Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s production of Titus Andronicus. Well, thanks for stating the obvious. You would had to have been...