Interviews and Features

Interview: ‘Electra’ Director Stevie Zimmerman

Stevie Zimmerman has a reputation in DC as a “must-see” director. She received her bachelors from Oxford and her masters from the University of Leeds in England. She directed The Pitmen Painters and...

An Interview with Erik Ransom on the Development of His New Play ‘Civil Blood (The Resurrection of Romeo)’

Just back from a production of his musical GRINDR: The Opera in Florida, Erik Ransom organized a private developmental reading of his latest work Civil Blood (The Resurrection of Romeo) for an...

Interview: Leah Mazade Discusses Peace Mountain Theatre Company’s ‘Lost in Yonkers’

Please give us your name, part you are playing in Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, and a brief description of your theatrical background. My name is Leah Mazade, and I’m playing Grandma Kurnitz in the...

Interview: Dominic North Discusses ‘The Red Shoes’ and Life As a Dancer with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Company

Based on the film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Red Shoes comes to The Kennedy Center October 10 – 15, 2017. The Red Shoes received two...

Analysis: Charlottesville Theater Groups Respond to Last Month’s Deadly Rally

On August 11th and 12th, a group of neo-Nazis, fascists, and white supremacists thronged Charlottesville, Virginia. They were there to protest – peacefully, they’d said – the removal of a statue of...

News: Two Years After Launching Mosaic, Ari Roth Reflects

This piece, “Two Years After Launching Mosaic, Ari Roth Reflects” by Marilyn Millstone was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on September 12,...

Interview: Everyman Artistic Director Vincent Lancisi on Serendipity and ‘M. Butterfly’

There’s a story circulating about Everyman Theatre’s Artistic Director, Vincent Lancisi, and it’s one of the best What I Did on My Summer Vacation yarns around. It involves two continents, 16,000...

Interview: David Rohde Interviews Cellist Amit Peled

Amit Peled is a story-teller. He happens to do it with a cello. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a genius audience member to find the entire story for yourself in the music. The charismatic...

Page-to-Stage New Play Festival: ‘Blind Spots’ by Brave Soul Collective

Skipping puddles on my way to The Kennedy Center, I reminisced: “It’s a rainy day. The sky is gray. I think I’ll smile anyway.” My childhood friend, Nancy, taught me that and it has stuck with me for...

Interview: Nicole Atkins on Performing at The Hamilton on September 12, 2017

“It was just so fun,” Nicole Atkins says about the recording process for Good Night Rhonda Lee, her fourth studio album. “We recorded it live, and everything was really in the present moment,...

Singing From a Trapeze: Interview with Tangle Movement Arts’ founder, Lauren Rile Smith

Lauren Rile Smith, a Philadelphia poet and performer, founded Tangle Movement Arts in 2011. She has trained trapeze and other circus arts at the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts and many other...

Doing Double Duty in the Philadelphia Fringe: An Interview with Jenna Kuerzi, Eric Singel, and Hannah Van Sciver

Three of the most enthusiastic veterans of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival are each doing not one, but two shows this year. Jenna Kuerzi finishes out the final installment of On the Rocks’ “Dead...

Tackling Suicide on Stage: Interviews with Nine Playwrights from Elephant Room Productions

The 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival offers a wide range of genres and topics, but few as sensitive and important as Suicide Stories: Gallery of the Untold — nine short plays by nine playwrights,...

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...

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...

Father, Son, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Interviews with Producer/Director Harry Dietzler and Director Jeff Dietzler of Upper Darby Summer Stage

Harry Dietzler, the executive and artistic director of Upper Darby Summer Stage, one of America’s oldest and most successful theater programs for young adults, founded the Summer Stage in 1976 as a...

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...

Interview: David Rohde Interviews Violist Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt

Is “star viola player” an oxymoron? Not if the viola player – a “violist” as opposed to a violinist – casts her net as wide as Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt. Milena, who last appeared in Washington in...

Interview: Joan Almedilla Discusses Playing Lady Thiang in ‘The King and I’ at The Kennedy Center

It’s difficult to imagine a more lush or beautiful production to take the stage at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts than Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I. The revival, which...

An Interview with Josh Hitchens and Ryan Walter: Going Dark in the New Jersey Fringe with ‘The Confession of Jeffrey Dahmer’

Between 1978 and 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer committed the shocking murders of seventeen men, involving necrophilia, dismemberment, cannibalism, and the preservation of the victims’ body parts. After years...

From Bethlehem to Philadelphia: An Interview with Rami Khader, Director of the Diyar Dance Theatre

Director Rami Khader, along with a group of talented and committed artists, both male and female and of differing ages and backgrounds, founded Diyar Dance Theatre in 2008. Based in Bethlehem, their...

Preview: ‘The Carol Burnett Show’ at the Laurel Mill Playhouse

This weekend, Laurel Mill Playhouse (LMP) will be doing two tributes. The first is to the wonderful Carol Burnett Show that graced our TVs from 1967-1978. The show included those wonderful comedic...

‘Hamlet’ at Laurel Hill Cemetery: An Interview with Rosey Hay and Rudy Caporaso of the REV Theatre Company

Every year, the REV Theatre Company fills Laurel Hill Cemetery — Philadelphia’s resting place of the rich, the powerful, and the famous — with an almost cult-like following of theatergoers, who see...

Romping Around the Globe: An Interview with Damon Bonetti, Director of Hedgerow Theatre’s ‘Around the World in 80 Days’

Damon Bonetti, a popular Philadelphia actor and director at various theaters and Co-Founding Artistic Director of The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective (The PAC), is directing a new production of...

Review: PBS Presents ‘A Capitol Fourth’

Every year PBS puts on a spectacular show with A Capitol Fourth and has the most talented people involved performing and behind the scenes. This year features The Blues Brothers with Dan Aykroyd, Jim...

Capital Fringe Preview: ‘HOWL’ in the Time of Trump’ at Sanctuary Theatre’s Performing Knowledge Project

I am not a specialist. I’ve never wanted to be a specialist. In fact, I’ve always wanted to be a non-specialist: someone who encounters life across many disciplines and many loves. As a result, I am a...

Interview: Landis and Jennifer Smith Discuss ‘The Beast in the Bayou’ to play at Wolf Trap July 6-7th and Penn’s Landing July 11th

The great thing about fairy tales is their malleability. Fairy tales have been around for millennia and are often transported from country to country, morphing with each region and time that they...

In the Moment: Interview with Theatrical Designer Deb Sivigny Part II

Continuing the conversation we started in Part I of this interview with costume and scenic designer Deb Sivigny, we delve a bit more into Deb’s work as a designer. Maybe even with some reveals and...

In the Moment Interview: Jordan Friend, Artistic Director of 4615 Theatre

A new generation of theater-makers are beginning to assert themselves in the DC area. They are the Millennial generation who have made DC their home over the past decade. Many are natives of the area,...

In the Moment: Interview with Theatrical Designer Deb Sivigny Part I

Deb Sivigny is one busy scenic and costume designer in the DC theater community. Just recently, she developed design elements for the Rorschach Theatre production of Forgotten Kingdoms. The 1st Stage...

Celebrating the Lives of the Emanuel Nine: An Interview with the Cast of New Freedom Theatre’s ‘Mother Emanuel’

During a prayer service on June 17, 2015, nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, were killed by a 21-year-old white...

Magic Time!: ‘Still Life with Rocket’ at Theater Alliance as Voyage to a New Form: A Q&A with Director Mollye Maxner

Still Life With Rocket is greater than the sum of its arts. The diverse forms of installation, choreography, and character-driven drama come together in this collaboratively devised experience in what...

Interview: Playwrights Hanna Eady and Edward Mast on ‘The Return,’ Now in US Premiere at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

Seeing The Return – the stunning new play that has just burst upon the stage at Mosaic Theater Company of DC – is like watching fireworks up close. In fact, the heat from this drama is so intense that...

The Dream Team that Made a Small Town Big: Interview with Erin Reilly and Matthew Decker of Theatre Horizon

Theatre Horizon (TH) is a professional nonprofit theatre company headquartered in Norristown, Pennsylvania, 20 miles west of Philadelphia. Since its inception, TH has presented critically-acclaimed...

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...

Rockwell, Warhol, and Warhola: A Conversation with James Warhola about Three Generations of American Illustrators at the Norman Rockwell Museum

Though a generation apart in age, Norman Rockwell (1894 New York City-1978 Stockbridge) and Andy Warhol (1928 Pittsburgh-1987 New York City) captured the tenor of their respective eras of 20th-century...

Interviews with Cohesion Playwrights Fellows, Part 2 of 2: Utkarsh Rajawat, Playwright of ‘Here Be Dragons’

After its award-winning Trans* Voices Workshop Series in Season 2, Cohesion Theatre Company (Cohesion) introduced a Playwrights Fellowship for Season 3. Cohesion’s Playwrights Fellowship aims “to...

From ‘Class Clown’ to Master of Clowning and Circus Arts: An Interview with Terry Brennan on Tribe of Fools’ ‘School Play’

Founder and Artistic Director of Tribe of Fools, Terry Brennan is back on stage this month in the Philadelphia SoLow Fest, with his company’s latest offering School Play. The original one-man show,...

Dangereuse: An Interview with Dorea Schmidt, Eliante in ‘The School for Lies’ at the Shakespeare Theatre Company

David Ives’s The School for Lies (adapted from Le Misanthrope by Molière and directed by Michael Kahn) has arrived at the Shakespeare Theatre! This charming comedy is at the Lansburgh Theatre now...

Who’s in Town?: Jaime Camil from TV’s ‘Jane the Virgin’ to Receive the Inspiration Award at GALA Hispanic Theatre’s Noche de Estrellas on Monday, June 5 at 6:30PM

Ok, I admit it. I’ve become slightly obsessed with the CW show Jane the Virgin this week. The love triangles, the mysteries, the heartwarming family moments, what’s not to love? In preparing to...

Interviews with Cohesion Playwrights Fellows, Part 1 of 2: Jen Diamond, Playwright of ‘Porn: A Love Story’

After its award-winning Trans* Voices Workshop Series in Season 2, Cohesion Theatre Company (Cohesion) introduced a Playwrights Fellowship for Season 3. Cohesion’s Playwrights Fellowship aims “to...

In the Moment: Interviews with Flying V’s Jason Schlafstein and Sydney Moore

With monikers like, Become Awesome and The Theatre for People Who Don’t Think They Like Theatre, Flying V burst onto the DC-metro area theater scene. In 2015, Flying V received the Helen Hayes Award...

In The Moment: Interviews With the Creative Cauldron ‘Bold New Works in Intimate Space Artistic Teams: Laura Connors Hull, Matt Conner, and Stephen Gregory Smith

Creative Cauldron continues to dazzle critics and audiences with its “Bold New Works for Intimate Stages” – a series of premier musicals. It is certainly rare when a smaller professional theater...

Interview: Dawn Ursula and Vincent Lancisi on ‘Trouble in Mind’ and Everyman Theatre’s Salon Series

Everyman Theatre of Baltimore is nearing the end of its season with the opening of Noises Off on May 19th, and soon the performance of their last Salon Series staged reading, Trouble in Mind on June...

Akeem Davis, Alex Keiper, and Matteo Scammell: An Interview with the Stars of ‘Buzzer’ at Theatre Exile

Theatre Exile closes its 2016-17 season with Tracey Scott Wilson’s searing drama Buzzer, which examines issues of race, class, and gender through the lens of urban gentrification. Directed by Matt...

Who’s in Town?: Morgan James Performing at the Hamilton, Thursday, May 18 at 7:30pm

Morgan James has one versatile voice. It is a voice that that can slip effortlessly from light lyric coloratura to Broadway belting, to Soul singing. Take a look at her career: James earned a coveted...

‘The Show Must Go On!’ Preview, Part 2: Interview with Jessica Myles Henkin

Stoop Storytelling, the Baltimore-based live show and podcast that features regular people telling “the extraordinary, true tales of their lives” is partnering with Everyman Theatre to present a night...

Josh Hitchens, Diane Richardson, Molly Edelman, and Megan Edelman Discuss ‘Anne of Green Gables’ and Victorian Theatre at Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion

The latest offering in Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion’s popular Victorian Theatre presentations is a new interpretation of Anne of Green Gables, playing for four performances this weekend in the...

Who’s in Town?: Debbie Allen Discusses Hosting the CityDance DREAMscape Gala on Saturday, May 6th at 8pm

Folks looking for a good cause and a night of show-stopping entertainment need look no further than CityDance’s annual DREAMscape Gala. This Saturday, May 6, donors can expect performances from the...

Interview: Jazz Chanteuse Changamiré

I met jazz chanteuse Changamire’ at a networking event. She quickly warmed up to me and gave me her latest jazz album “Love” to listen to. I was blown away. In our interview she shared how she got...