Emily Gilson

Review: ‘Cinderella’ at Imagination Stage

Full disclosure: I love fairy tales. All of them. I always have, despite also being a girl who asked myself one day why Rapunzel couldn’t just make a ladder with all her own hair and escape the tower...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘A Two Woman Hamlet’

English majors, linguists, and Shakespeare lovers (and fearers) rejoice: the creative team behind Fringe’s A Two Woman Hamlet have broken one of theatre’s great masterpieces down to a comfortable...

Review: ‘Harry Shearer: Up To Eleven’ at The Kennedy Center

My father first showed me This Is Spinal Tap when I was about fifteen. It was immediately one of my absolute favorite films. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times since then, tried and failed to learn...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War’

2000FeetUp Theatre Company is a new Iranian-Canadian theatre helmed by director Siavash Shabanpour. The company is based in Toronto and has brought Romanian-French playwright Matei Visniec’s 1997 work...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘A Slow Bullet’

I am so, so glad we’re finally talking about mental illness and suicide. According to the most recent CDC statistic, there are 800,000 suicides a year in the United States alone (that’s 123 people a...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Deadlie Affairs: Arden of Faversham’ by Guillotine Theatre

Aaaahhh, DC. The theatre town we love to pretend we hate. A city saturated with classically-trained talent whose bread and butter is day-player bits on true crime dramas – the ones I used to...

Review: ‘Doctor Faustus’ at Brave Spirits Theatre

Full disclosure: If your only exposure to the classics was Shakespeare in high school, then be ready to get out there and see what else there is. There’s much to be found from the period that’s...

Review: “Weird Al” Yankovic at Wolf Trap

“All bets are off,” says Wolf Trap’s website, when “Weird Al” Yankovic, King of Parody, takes over the concert hall. Absolutely anything can happen. 35 years on, the polka-dancing, accordion-playing...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Seven Windows’

In keeping with the theme of several shows in this year’s festival, Philadelphia-based SHARP Dance Company’s Seven Windows is another piece focusing on the power of dreams, death, and reincarnation....

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘H5x7’

Did you miss the Henriad this past spring at BAM? Or the Hollow Crown? Do you find Shakespeare inaccessible? Barabbas Theatre can help. Taking a cue from the play’s Chorus, urging the audience to...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Brownie and Lolli Go to Hollywood’

In theory, this looked and sounded great. Brownie and Lolli Go to Hollywood is a screwball comic cabaret riff on all sorts of current issues: drug use, abortion, eating disorders, the rising costs of...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘It Will All Make Sense in the Morning’

“I took your dreams and I put them in a jar and I buried them under a tree. How did I do that?” It Will All Make Sense in the Morning, by Erica Smith, luckily does mostly make sense on the night you...

2016 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Petunia and Chicken’

I have never started a Fringe with such joy. The cause of that joy is kids’-show-in-disguise Petunia and Chicken, the brainchild of Animal Engine (husband and wife team Carrie Brown and Karim...

Review: ‘William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)’ at Folger Theatre

Whatever you’re doing, stop now. Run – do not walk; run – to Folger Theatre for the glorious ray of sunshine that is William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged). Created by the Reduced...

Review: ‘Annie’ at National Theatre

There are two things they always say never to work with: animals and children. There are exceptions, obviously. For six days at The National Theatre, Annie and Sandy — the bright red-headed,...

2015 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Bloody Banquet’

Hungry? Well, there’s a banquet waiting. In a tiny black box space just south of the river, Brave Spirits Theatre, known for staging intimate updates of early modern and Jacobean drama, presents a...

2015 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Shit Stories: The Best of Our Worst Moments’

As you can probably guess from the title, this is a show about shit. Mostly literal shit, but there’s some figurative shit thrown in for good measure. The 7 storytellers on Team McVey are full of it....

2015 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Domestic Animals’

“I have trouble distinguishing things that are real from things imagined.” This is the reality we enter when we meet Lori, the “lone wolf” of the deeply moving Domestic Animals. Beautifully directed...

2015 Capital Fringe Review: ‘straight on til moUrning’

This is not the Neverland you remember. It’s grown-up, it’s grittier, nothing is certain; and with straight on til moUrning, local physical theatre company relEASE has presented a daring and fresh new...