Mike Bevel

Interview: ‘You and My Mother Can Purchase Sweaters for Obese People to Your Heart’s Content’ – A Conversation with Cameron Folmar

David, the character Cameron Folmar plays in The Santaland Diaries (now at Drafthouse Comedy Theater in DC through December 23), struggles with compartmentalizing his identity as a Macy’s Elf with...

Review: ‘Twelfth Night’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

Shakespeare Theatre Company has set Twelfth Night inside of an airport lounge, and why shouldn’t they, it is their production, not ours, and Lee Savage’s design is a marvel of verisimilitude, so it...

Review: Pinchas Zukerman Performs Bach at The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra

We learned, shortly after 8 p.m., that half the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was stuck on 495. Traffic unites people with weak social bonds; it gives us something communal to commiserate about....

Interview: Michael Brush & Zachary Michel of Charm City Fringe Fest 2017

DC Theater Arts was excited to speak to Charm City Fringe Festival founders Zach Michel and Michael Brush last week at the Lexington Market. We enjoyed a nice chat over crab cakes and local beer. Here...

Review: ‘Barriers’ at Charm City Fringe Festival

Barriers, conceived by Trajectory Dance Project, a Baltimore-based dance ensemble, is a beautiful series of five pieces focusing on human connections, and how those connections can break down:...

Review: ‘Clinically Happy’ at Charm City Fringe Festival

“It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, “So Much Happiness” If there’s anything other people feel entitled to explain to you, it’s your own happiness: what you...

Review: ‘Amok Monologues: All Pucked Up’ at Charm City Fringe Festival

“Everyone has at least one story that can break your heart.” – Claudia Shear, “Blown Sideways Through Life” Fringe festivals offer a bumper crop of one-person shows – monologues that invite us to...

Review: ‘The Big Thank You’ at Charm City Fringe Festival

“and I mean, though often forget, to give thanks, to faint down by the kitchen table in a prayer of rejoicing” — Anne Sexton, “Welcome Morning” Every day for a year, playwright Alan Kreizenbeck posted...

Review: ‘Don’t Come In’ at Charm City Fringe Festival

It’s best to start with the description of Don’t Come In from the catalog: Love is scary. And it just might kill you. Stubborn lovers Em and Missy, unable to express their true feelings for one...

Review: ‘Safe as Houses’ at Pinky Swear Productions

What do we do when a storm rages? We fold the laundry. We try to understand our daughter. We clean a table that wasn’t dirty to begin with. We don’t think about what’s being washed way in the storm...

Review: ‘The Woman in Black’ at Fells Point Corner Theatre

I’ve seen one ghost in my life – a woman in a 1980s housecoat on the veranda of a beach house in North Carolina. She stood with her hands on the rail, looking out at the ocean. There was a terrible...

Review: ‘I’ll Get You Back Again’ at Round House Theatre

There’s a lot going on in Sarah Gancher’s I’ll Get You Back Again, now at the Round House Theatre through October 29: A bitter stand-up comedian and her struggles to reconcile and come to terms with...

Review: ‘Our Town’ at Olney Theatre Center

Thornton Wilder’s New Hampshire creation, Grover’s Corners, sits on some of the oldest rock in the world: “a shelf of Devonian basalt” crossed with “vestiges of Mesozoic shale,” we’re told. The oldest...

Review: ‘I Killed My Mother’ at Spooky Action Theater

Andras Viskey’s I Killed My Mother, now in production at Spooky Action Theater, is a challenging bit of business. Its wordless opening is several minutes of wandering by various members of the company...

Review: ‘Clover’ at Ally Theatre Company

But suicides have a special language. Like carpenters, they want to know which tools; They never ask why build. — Anne Sexton, “Wanting to Die” Laura Rocklyn and Ty Hallmark’s new work, Clover, now...

Review: ‘Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train’ at 1st Stage

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train, now in production at 1st Stage, opens while the audience is still finding their seats. On a raised platform, in the round, Angel Cruz (Luis Alberto...

Review: ‘Noah: Apocalypse’ at LiveArtDC

We will now consider Amanda Quain’s latest play, Noah: Apocalypse, currently playing through September 18 at a bar in Petworth. Now is as good enough a time as any other to find oneself thinking about...

Review: ‘Neverwhere’ at Rorschach Theatre

In 1582, a village parson heard the deathbed confession of a man named Richard Barley, who had married his butter churn. Barley claimed he had been bewitched into matrimony by a fairy called Apron Jon...

Review: Silver Spring Stage 2017 One Act Festival, Weekend Three

One-act plays are tricky beasts. Playwrights must balance tension with plot and story. Too little tension, and the audience is left bored, slogging through countably interminable minutes until the...

Interview: Montana DeBor, Mark Harding, Gwynne Flanagan Cox, and Elise “Teddy” Sipos from Sweet Spot Aerial Production’s ‘Smoky Mirrors’

“My faith is a great weight hung on a small wire.” – Anne Sexton Each performer in Sweet Spot Aerial’s Smoky Mirrors places great faith in materials: fabric, rope, chains, muscle. There’s also a...

Review: ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ featuring Tom Teasley at Constellation Theatre Company

When The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari hit German movie screens in 1920, it baffled and delighted audiences who had primarily been entertaining themselves with annual Film Festivals of Fred Ott’s sneeze and...

Review: ‘Spring Awakening’ at Wildwood Summer Theatre at the Arts Barn

Spring Awakening (co-created by Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik and now playing at the Arts Barn in The Kentlands) has a circular tragedy to it. Teens, struggling through youth and confusion and bodies...

Interview: Performers from the Upcoming ‘Atomic Doll Productions Presents: Shocked and Amazed!’ – Part II

Atomic Doll Productions Presents: Shocked and Amazed! was inspired by James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed: On and Off the Midway, the world’s leading journal on weirdness in entertainment for over 30...

Interview: Performers from the Upcoming ‘Atomic Doll Productions Presents: Shocked and Amazed!’ – Part I

Catching Up With Atomic Doll Productions! Sideshows and carnival acts have always offered normies a safe space to vicariously scratch that thrill itch. It’s equal part “I want to watch and also not...

Review: ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ at the Summer Dinner Theatre at Montgomery College

In 1850 Oregon, Adam Pontipee (a velvety-voiced Da’Von Moody) has come to town to trade some furs and look for a bride. We know he’s a romantic because his opening song is “Bless Your Beautiful Hide”...

Review: ‘to tell my story: a hamlet fanfic’ at The Welders at Silver Spring Black Box Theater

Maybe the only way the play Hamlet could ever make sense is to filter it through a teenaged girl perspective. Watching a 30-year-old man galumph and philosophize his way through Elsinore – casually...

Review: ‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill’ at Anacostia Playhouse

“These are my friends,” Billie Holiday (Anya Nebel) tells her accompanist (LeVar Betts), gesturing at the audience. It is March of 1959, and Holiday will be dead in four months. She’s singing at...

Review: ‘Oblivion’ at Unexpected Stage Company

“Games have rules,” Brooklyn-parent Dixon (Zach Brewster-Geisz) tells his wife, Pam (Mindy Shaw). They’re playing Boggle, Dixon has tried to play “Slurpee,” and both are a little wounded that their...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘My Lack of a Social Life’

Douglas Stafford is a very talented juggler. If that is an interest of yours, if you like juggling, and you’ve got an hour, then you may like this show. Stafford is pretty good as a magician. If you...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Kara Sevda’

Let’s get this part out of the way quickly: Lisa VillaMil’s Kara Sevda (at Shopkeepers through July 22) is an exhilarating piece of theater, masterfully and assuredly directed by Kat Haan, beautifully...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Garbage Person Karaoke’

Over the 65-minute run time of Caroline Bennett’s Garbage Person Karaoke, there are moments of painful comedy and bitter emotional connections with that specific kind of heartbreak that kicks the...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘There Ain’t No More’

Willie Carlisle is an astonishing performer, and if I were only reviewing his performance of mountain folk music, I’d recommend this show with the entirety of my full heart. Guitar, banjo, squeeze...

Review: ‘We Found the Wild Things’ at Who What Where Theater Collective

It is New Year’s Eve, 2015, and seven high school seniors have gathered at the home of the twins, Nicole (Skye Lindberg) and August (Zachary Wilcox). There’s Maisy (Catherine Anne Gilbert), quiet,...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Not Quite: Asian American by Law, Asian Woman by Desire’

See this show. Stop reading this review, click this hyperlink, buy a ticket, and see it. Don’t want to go alone? I’ll see it with you. We’ve never met before? Who cares. I’m your new best friend for...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Ghouls’

There is a moment in Sean Surla’s one-woman piece, Ghouls, where Emel Haddad – Surla’s stand-in for herself, and an extraordinarily generous actress – describes driving to the top of Pike’s Peak with...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Caveat’

Caveat (written and directed by Ben Lockshin and playing at Gallaudet University’s Eastman Studio Theater) is a “One’s-a” show, where each character is an idea of a person more than an actual person....

Review: ‘Godspell’ at Infinity Theatre Company

The early 1970s gave us three Bible-themed musicals: Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell (currently in a production directed by Alan Ostroff at Infinity Theatre Company in Annapolis), as well as Andrew Lloyd...

​Review: ‘Into the Woods’ at Summer Dinner Theatre at Montgomery College

Each time I’ve seen Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, now playing at Montgomery College’s Summer Dinner Theatre through July 2nd, is the best time I’ve seen Into the Woods and this production,...