John Stoltenberg

Magic Time! A Look at Signature Theatre’s Stunning ‘West Side Story’

Signature Theatre’s production of West Side Story is every bit as eye-filling and ear-thrilling as any lover of this great American musical could wish. On a spacious thrust stage inside the intimate...

‘The Gospel of Lovingkindness’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

There is a shibboleth shared by liberals and conservatives alike that when a young black man shoots to death another young black man in the inner city, the fault lies in themselves. Something about...

‘How to Catch a Leprechaun’ at The Keegan Theatre

This being a show meant for kids, I defer to a critical opinion I overheard right afterward, voiced by a child not yet 5: “That was really cool! Really funny too!” Coauthored by Mario Baldessari and...

‘Seasonal Disorder’ at Washington Improv Theater

‘Tis the season for jolly laughter, and if you like humor that’s loopy, irreverent, quick-witted, and fresh, you’ll fit right in at Washington Improv Theater’s annual Seasonal Disorder. It’s all made...

‘Stage Kiss’ at Round House Theatre

Plays about playmaking have an enduring appeal. Think Noises Off, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Shows about shows on the musical stage have indelible charm. Think Chorus Line, Kiss Me Kate....

‘Bad Jews’ at The Studio Theatre

When I first saw Joshua Harmon’s brilliant play Bad Jews at The Studio Theatre about this time last year, I could not contain my enthusiasm. I praised it to the skies: Bad Jews is so over-the-top...

Reading of ‘Noura’ at Georgetown University’s Myriad Voices: A Cross-Cultural Performance Festival

On my explorations into the local universe of university theater, I’ve sighted some terrific stuff. Most of it I’ve written about for DCMetroTheaterArts (see links to my recent faves below). But if I...

‘Black Nativity’ at Theater Alliance

If it is true that theater originated as worship and ritual—as a healing form of human communion with sacred mystery—then that history is surely raising the rafters of the Anacostia Playhouse these...

‘Entertaining Mr. Sloane’ at The Edge of the Universe Players 2

When a dark farce titled Entertaining Mr. Sloane opened in London in 1964, it was viewed as rude, scandalous, and repugnant because of its homosexual content and its three main characters’ blatant...

‘Sons of the Prophet’ at Theater J

Theater J’s first triumph of the season was Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ semi-autobiographical Queens Girl in the World. Its second is also loosely autobiographical: Stephen Karam’s Sons of the Prophet—a...

Magic Time! ‘Appomattox’ at Washington National Opera by John Stoltenberg

Appomattox, the magnificent and powerful opera by Philip Glass and Christopher Hampton that premiered at The Kennedy Center last night, looks at American history with a breathtaking urgency and...

‘War With the Newts’ at Georgetown University

When an actor comes on stage and tells you to silence your cell phone, etc., then identifies himself as a newt, you might be a bit perplexed. And when, further, he announces that all the humans you’ll...

Magic Time! ‘Gender-Flipping the Bard: A Q&A with Brave Spirits Theatre’s Kevin Finkelstein’

Back in December 2014 I had a conversation with the Director Kevin Finkelstein that has stayed with me. I had just seen his staging of A Klingon Christmas Carol, a one-night-only seasonal novelty...

The Apple Family Cycle: ‘Sorry’ at The Studio Theatre

You know that feeling you get when you go to something—you attend it as a visitor or you drop in as an interloper—and by the time that something ends, you feel as if you belonged to it? Well, there’s...

Magic Time! ‘World Builders’ at Forum Theatre

To judge by social media, love and madness are a thing. Here are a few choice examples now making the rounds in the meme-osphere: “Love is merely a madness….” (William Shakespeare) “There is always...

‘Unexplored Interior (This Is Rwanda: The Beginning and End of the Earth)’ at Mosaic Theater of DC

There comes a moment early in Act One when Raymond, a young man who left his family in Rwanda to learn film making at NYU, returns to his homeland, which has become a devastation. The 100-day Hutu...

Magic Time! ‘Winners and Losers’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

I left Winners and Losers thinking, Wow, there’s more here than meets the eye. Or, as one of the performers said in an interview, “The show really bangs around in your head….” On the face of it,...

Magic Time! The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: Darius & Twig’ at The Kennedy Center

I cannot help but think that if W.E.B. DuBois were alive, he would absolutely love Darius & Twig, the passionately purposeful play by Caleen Sinnette Jennings adapted from Walter Dean Myers’s popular...

‘Top Girls’ at George Washington University

I may have missed it, but to my knowledge no playwright in the current Women’s Voices Theater Festival set out to write a feminist-socialist play and explicitly said so. (Not that there’s anything...

Magic Time! ‘Avenue Q’ at Constellation Theatre Company

The intriguing tagline for Constellation Theatre Company’s 2015/16 season is “Playtime for Grownups,” which could not have been more appropriate on opening night of its Avenue Q—the wholly humable...

‘Smartphones–a pocket-size farce’ at Ambassador Theater

saw this show last nite. LMAO. 2 funny. OMG. u G2G. So might read a hasty text from a self-absorbed hipster about Smartphones, the ridiculously delightful farce now playing at Mead Lab Flashpoint....

Magic Time! A Report on ‘Straight Outta Hell’ at Next Day Theater

With a stand-up comedy act plus five skits, the laughs last Saturday at Straight Outta Hell—Next Day Theater’s one-night-only sketch-comedy surprise—were well earned. Producer Matt Spangler had once...

Magic Time!: A Conversation with Audrey Cefaly, Author of ‘Maytag Virgin’ at The Women’s Voices Theater Festival:

I have now seen 26 entries in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, and six have shot to the top of my list in terms of writing I most admired. (I mean the playwriting itself, not the production...

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘The Dealer of Ballynafeigh’ at The Keegan Theatre

When a particular company and a particular playwright hit it off such that they keep knocking it out of the park—as have The Keegan Theatre and Belfast-born Rosemary Jenkinson—theirs has to be a match...

Magic Time!: Blown Away by a Bible Story Midway Through the Women’s Voices Theater Festival

To date I have been to 20 productions and one staged reading that are officially in DC’s Women’s Voices Theater Festival (11 of which I have written about for DCMetroTheaterArts), and I am booked to...

‘Bug’ at SeeNoSun OnStage at Anacostia Arts Center (Review #1)

When I saw the SeeNoSun OnStage production of Tracy Letts’s first play, Killer Joe, a year ago June, I wrote a rave and called it “a powerful knockout of a show.” So it was with keen anticipation that...

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Hootenanny’ at Guilliotine Theatre

Hootenanny by Monique LaForce is a two-hander with an unsettling story up its sleeve. It’s a story about a man and a woman that incrementally builds nerve-fraying psychological tension from what seems...

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Alice in Wonderland’ at Synetic Theater (Review #2)

If you were looking for a local troupe to put Alice’s fabled Wonderland on stage, your top choice would have to be Synetic Theater. And no wonder. Synetic’s trademark physical theater enthralls one’s...

Magic Time! The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: A Report on ‘Lady Lay’ at Scena Theatre

As you take your seat at Scena Theatre’s production of Lady Lay, don’t be surprised to see the spitting image of Bob Dylan in the house. It’s the actor Ron Litman, who will pop into the play anon....

Magic Time! The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: A Conversation With the Director and Writer of Arcturus Theater Company’s ‘The Point’ Ross Heath and Marilyn Ansevin Austin

I’ve made a point to see as many productions in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival as I can. Some have thrilled me; some have not. For me theatergoing is like a gambling addiction. I always go...

Magic Time!: The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Animal’ at The Studio Theatre (Review #1)

After I saw an early Women’s Voices Theater Festival production (I’ve been to 16 and counting), a question lingered in my mind: Exactly what distinguishes a play as being in a woman’s voice other than...

‘As One’ at Urban Arias

To all appearances, As One is a chamber opera about someone who transitions from the gender category he was assigned at birth into the gender category she believes she belongs in. As One presents...

Magic Time!: A Report on the Women’s Voices Theater Festival Reading of Lisa Loomer’s ‘Roe’ at The Kennedy Center

The Kennedy Center’s entry in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival was a one-night-only reading of Roe, a new two-act play by Lisa Loomer that dramatically personalizes pivotal chapters in the...

Magic Time!: An Interview with Playwright Stacy Jewell Lewis On ‘7 Layers Captive’: Her True Story of Being Sex Trafficked, Playing at The Kennedy Center on October 10th at 7 PM

Back in summer of 2014, I discovered an extraordinary play, playwright, and performer—7 Layers Captive, written and performed by Stacy Jewell Lewis based on her own true story of being abducted into...

‘Bhavi the Avenger’ at Convergence Theatre

Marquis D. Gibson does something in his magnetic performance as the title character in Bhavi the Avenger that I don’t recall ever seeing in theater before: he pretty much singlehandedly makes sense of...

Magic Time!: Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Queens Girl in the World’ at Theater J

Theater J has just extended the run of Caleen Sinnette Jennings’ semi-autobiographical Queens Girl in the World through October 18, and my viewing of the play last night left no doubt in my mind about...

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘The Point’ at Arcturus Theater Company

Four-year-old Arcturus Theater Company—a group of DC theater enthusiasts committed to presenting plays that will “prompt discussion on topics that do not come up naturally in everyday...

‘Chimerica’ at The Studio Theatre

Lucy Kirkwood did not think up the word Chimerica—it was coined by a historian and an economist to name the combustably combined economies of China and the U.S. But wowza did she think up a whiz-bang...

‘Step Afrika! Step Explosion’

I just discovered a phenomenal performing arts group that rocked and moved me as much as any experience in theater I can recall. The name of the group is Step Afrika!, an organization renowned around...

Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘Night Falls on the Blue Planet’ at Theater Alliance

Kathleen Akerley’s Night Falls on the Blue Planet is a rapturously funny and brainy comedy about a woman named Renee who is losing her mind and finding her body. (Or something like that. It’s...

Magic Time! ‘an awQward noise’

Who gets to say what in the theater has become an increasingly pressing question. Of course the question has been pressing for a long time; it’s just now getting paid significant attention by folks...

Magic Time!: ‘Dogfight’ & ‘Dear Evan Hansen’: Pasek & Paul Transforming the Course of American Musical Theater

Last season The Keegan Theatre mounted a Vietnam War–era musical called Hair. In a column I described that production as “radiant and thrilling,” “an exuberant love fest as timeless as human hope.”...

‘A Conversation With the Man Who Killed My Son’ at Dynamic Wellness

Twice a week in this land of the free, a white police officer kills a black person—this according to under-reported stats from the FBI. From the official law-enforcement point of view, these are...

‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ at Scena Theatre

Scena Theatre has brought back its hit 2011 production of The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy of errors, and DC’s summer just got wittier and sweeter. In Scena’s delectable...

The Women’s Voices Theater Festival: ‘#DeathParty’: ‘How We Died of Disease-Related Illness’ and ‘Bones in Whispers’ at Longacre Lea

The eagerly anticipated Women’s Voices Theatre Festival kicked off with the opening of Longacre Lea’s production of two world-premiere one-acts, which the company collectively dubs #DeathParty. The...

‘One in the Chamber’ at The Mead Theatre Lab

The authenticity and specificity of Katie Sullivan’s scenic and properties design for One in the Chamber could qualify it as a character in this engrossing new play by Marja-Lewis Ryan. Even before we...

Magic Time!: A Love Letter to ‘Dear Evan Hansen’

Dear Dear Evan Hansen, I know it might sound odd, but this is a love letter to a musical. I saw you for the first time in my life last night, and I knew right away I had to write you to tell you it...

‘code name: Cynthia’ at Pallas Theatre Collective

Stephen Sondheim would do well to watch his back. Pallas Theatre Collective has just mounted a new musical, code name: Cynthia, that is just as smart and pointed in its book and lyrics and just as...

Magic Time!: DC Theater’s Whopping Wayfinding Problem

When I, a longtime theater buff, moved to DC nearly a dozen years ago, I discovered something weird: The Metro DC theater scene is utterly confusing to anyone who doesn’t already know their way around...

2015 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Brothel’

Playwright Isa Seyran has told forthrightly the origin story of Brothel: Reading about the extreme gender imbalance of men to women in North Dakota resulting from an oil boom thanks to fracking,...