Featured

Review: ‘Anything Goes’ at Arena Stage

“De-Lovely” doesn’t even begin to cover it. Arena Stage’s production of Anything Goes is as close to musical theater heaven as you can get. Cole Porter’s classic melodies and innuendo-laden lyrics, a...

Man Shouts ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!’ at Hippodrome’s ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

A man reportedly shouted “Heil Hitler! Heil Trump!” at last night’s performance of A Fiddler on the Roof at Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre. The Baltimore Sun is reporting that a man stood up in the...

Trying to Fall Out of Love in a Laundromat: Playwright Bob Bartlett on ‘The Accident Bear’

With its title, The Accident Bear, and its performance location, a laundromat in Annapolis, I was most intrigued to learn more about local playwright Bob Bartlett’s new work. The production of The...

Review: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ at The Hippodrome Theatre

The spirits of displacement and change hang heavily over Fiddler on the Roof these days. What keeps it all from becoming, well, dispiriting is the heartfelt humanity evident in every timeless bar of...

Review: ‘As You Like It’ at Keegan Theatre

The paradise in Shakespeare’s Arden Forest, a beautiful place where everybody is happy, communal, and fed, doesn’t exist in reality. But if it did, you’d want to be there. And since you can’t, here’s...

Review: ‘Silent Night’ at the Kennedy Center Washington National Opera

The Washington National Opera’s current production of the opera Silent Night is a shattering indictment of the futility and waste of war set during the historical truce that occurred during World War...

Review: ‘Our Class’ at Georgetown University

Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class opens in 1926 in a kindergarten classroom in a small town in northeastern Poland. Whereas most of Europe’s Jews had experienced a long history of expulsions and...

Review: ‘Reditum’ at GALA Hispanic Theatre Flamenco Festival

No more than ten minutes into Reditum – a Flamenco dance performance by José Barrios and Company, at the GALA Hispanic Theatre on Friday night – the man of the hour is drenched in sweat. Barrios, who...

Review: ‘Billy Elliot’ at Signature Theatre

Signature’s Billy Elliot the Musical soars with expressive, youthful dance energy and a liberating message of doing what you need to do to be who you want to be. Directed and choreographed by Matthew...

Ally Theatre Company Commissions Playwright Doug Robinson for Mapping Racism Project

Ally Theatre Company is pleased to announce Doug Robinson as the commissioned playwright for our 2019 Mapping Racism Project, produced in partnership with the Hyattsville Community Development...

In the Moment: Sound Design Enriches ‘King John’ at The Folger Theatre

Folger’s rendering of the seldom-produced King John is more than impressive Shakespearean rhetoric and the checking off on a bucket list of plays to produce. With a deft touch, director Aaron Posner...

A Youthful Fresh Take on ‘Our Class’ at Georgetown University

Long before the recent shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Derek Goldman had planned to direct a production of Our Class with student actors at Georgetown University. It is a play...

Dramaturg Becomes Playwright with The Welders ‘In This Hope: A Pericles Project’

The DC playwright collective The Welders bills itself as “the only playwright collective devoted exclusively to developing and producing new work.” When the second grouping of The Welders – whose...

Review: ‘Beetlejuice’ at the National Theatre

You can’t miss Betelgeuse. A star in the constellation Orion, this supergiant is red as flame and one of the 10 brightest stars in the night sky. At approximately 10 million years old, Betelgeuse...

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...

Review: ‘Dracula’ at We Happy Few

Halloween may be over, but the horror season is still in full swing. We Happy Few Theatre Company invites you to “listen to the children of the night” with Dracula, a repertoire production, at CHAW,...

Review: ‘Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay!’ at Nu Sass Productions

Nobel laureate Dario Fo’s Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! (one of several English language renderings of the original title, Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga!) opens as Antonia (Francesca Marie Chilcote) and her friend...

Review: ‘Things That Are Round’ at Rep Stage

The mental province that stretches from magical thinking to ordinary self-delusion is given a new survey in Callie Kimball’s Things That Are Round, now having its world premiere via the Equity players...

Seventh Annual Charm City Fringe Festival – How to Fringe 2018

What is Fringe? Today begins the Seventh Annual Charm City Fringe Festival, a celebration of new and emerging independent theatre that will continue through November 11th. The festival offers 22...

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...

Review: ‘Anastasia’ at The Kennedy Center

Will you be swept up into the legend of Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia? When her family was executed during the Russian Revolution, the rumor spread that...

Shaina Taub Lovers Rejoice! ‘As You Like It’ Lands at Keegan

I’m a big fan of composer Shaina Taub. Her unique blending of socially conscious theater and pop-folk tunes has brought her great acclaim in recent years. After adapting and musicalizing two...

Review: ‘King John’ at Folger Theatre

King John is so rarely performed (indeed, it’s been a decade since I last saw it staged) that the current Aaron Posner-directed production at the Folger Theatre opens with a primer on the players and...

Seventh Annual Charm City Fringe Festival: What to See and Where to See It

The Seventh Annual Charm City Fringe Festival is taking place in the Bromo Arts District from November 1 through November 11, 2018. Here’s a listing of all the shows. Get fringing! Fringe Shows with...

Review: ‘Venus in Fur’ at 4615 Theatre Company

One of the most remarkable things about D.C. theater is its abundance of good plays, professionally produced and performed, yet often staged in places that are, to put it mildly, a bit odd. Nowhere is...

Review: ‘The Agitators’ at Mosaic Theater Company

“Do you still believe there can be a country for all?” When that blunt question comes up in The Agitators—Mat Smart’s deeply affecting play about the friendship between Susan B. Anthony and Frederick...

Review: ‘Sheila and Moby’ by Flying V at the Writer’s Center

Sheila and Moby is a show about a young woman and a friend she thought she’d left behind forever. It’s also about personal responsibility as a member of the community, doing the thing that works when...

Talking Shakespeare with Ted van Griethuysen at the Shakespeare Theatre Company

How do you interview a legend? This was the question I pondered on the way to the Lansburgh Theatre to interview Ted van Griethuysen, one of the finest actors of his generation. Shakespearean par...

Review: ‘Sweat’ at Everyman Theatre

Lynn Nottage last year became the first woman to win a second Pulitzer Prize for Drama thanks to her play Sweat, a dramatization of the collapse of the American unskilled labor market circa 2000, now...

Desdemona Chiang Directs ‘King of the Yees’ at Baltimore Center Stage

If you haven’t already heard, Baltimore Center Stage is producing Playwright Lauren Yee’s King of the Yees. And in case you weren’t aware, this play is kind of a big deal. The story, which takes place...

Review: ‘Long Way Down’ at The Kennedy Center

Long Way Down, adapted from the renowned young adult novel in verse by Jason Reynolds, is told in the voice of a 15-year-old named Will and performed by the prodigiously talented Justin Weaks. He is...

Review: ‘The Duchess of Malfi’ at Brave Spirits Theater

Words have lethal consequences in the clear-eyed, unflinching production of The Duchess of Malfi from Brave Spirits Theatre. Under the sure-handed direction of Casey Kaleba, The Duchess of Malfi is...

Review: ‘East of Eden’ at NextStop Theatre Company

Can one escape the sins of their ancestors? Can one choose their own course and overcome an evil background? These questions are explored in NextStop Theatre Company’s glorious new adaptation of John...

Magic Time!: ‘Actually’ by Theater J at Arena Stage

The vexing concept of consent in sex gets a seductively smart parsing in Anna Ziegler’s Actually. Now playing in an electrically well-acted Theater J production directed by Johanna Greunhut, Actually...

Review: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ at the Kennedy Center

It has taken more than 35 years for Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s iconic musical Little Shop of Horrors to reach the Kennedy Center. But it’s been worth the wait! The Kennedy Center’s Broadway...

A Conversation with Playwright Naomi Iizuka and Director Jon Jon Johnson

By Sophie Herreid, Caitlin Partridge, Lauren Patton I had so many hopes. I had so many dreams. But I died I died I died along the way. – Chorus of Refugees, ‘Anon[ymous]’ Playwright Naomi Iizuka...

Review: ‘The Fever’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Audience participation can so often be a painful and unwelcome component of a night at the theater, especially if, like myself, you’re prone to minor panic attacks at the thought of being randomly...

Review: ‘Illyria, or What You Will’ by Avant Bard

Illyria is fabulous, darlings. The clothes are to die for. The décor is out of its 1980s mind. The music is as eclectic as it is electric. And plot elements and characters drawn from Twelfth Night fit...

Review: ‘Actually’ by Theater J at Arena Stage

The idea of sexual consent might seem simple: no means stop and yes means carry on. In practice, however, nothing could be further from the truth. The predicaments stemming from this issue that so...

Five Questions for PUBLIQuartet

PUBLIQuartet is not a typical string quartet. Violinists Curtis Stewart and Jannina Norpoth, violist Nick Revel, and cellist Amanda Gookin make up this unique ensemble dedicated to improvising,...

Washington Stage Guild Founder Ann Norton Steps Down as Executive Director

The Washington Stage Guild announced the stepping-down of Executive Director Ann Norton, one of WSG’s Founding Members. Norton’s 32 years in leadership roles helped nurture the Washington Stage Guild...

Magic Time!: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ at Round House Theatre

I’ve been wary of this play since it was first produced in 1997. I remember hearing that it was about a pedophile and his niece and that its treatment of the uncle was sympathetic. So I didn’t trust...

Michael Bobbitt’s ‘Aida’ Mixes Grandeur and Intimacy at Constellation

Michael Bobbitt gets around. This master-of-all-trades, whose adaptation of Aida is now playing to sold-out audiences at Constellation Theatre, has danced, directed and choreographed his way around...

Review: ‘Henry V’ by Faction of Fools

A current exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library explores Winston Churchill’s admiration for Shakespeare, above all the World War II-era patriotic inspiration of Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V....

2019 Capital Fringe Applications Now Open!

Applications are now open for the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival! See below for application details. OPTION 1: FRINGE RUN VENUE Participation in the Fringe Festival is an opportunity for you to develop...

Review: ‘Blight’ by Pinky Swear Productions at Anacostia Playhouse

A few years ago, the teenage son of a single mom shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic, and now the nice suburban home they lived in is a blight. The house not only brings the neighborhood down; it...

Review: ‘Figaro in Four Quartets’ by the In Series

From behind tall blank panels, a cast of characters drawn from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro emerge, dressed in all white period garb, staging vignettes of frustrated and consummated love punctuated...

Magic Time!: ‘Chocolate Covered Ants’ by Restoration Stage at THEARC

When three hours in the theater elapse faster than many a 90-minute performance, it’s a good bet you’ve been in the thrall of a master storyteller. And that’s what happens in Chocolate Covered Ants,...

Review: ‘Frankenstein’ by We Happy Few

A giant, wheezing monster, many feet tall and wide, a formless head towering over the audience, bathed in green light, with a voice made of dust and despair. That’s just one of the many fabulous...

Magic Time!: Actor Michael Kevin Darnall Opens Up About Being Open on Stage

When Michael Kevin Darnall plays a character who is the focus of a long scene and we can watch every nuance and shading of his emotional expression without interruption, he can be transfixing. When I...