Magic Time!

Magic Time! ‘Choirboy’ at The Studio Theatre

There comes a scene in Choir Boy at The Studio Theatre when five young black men stand naked in dimly lit separate shower stalls singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in glorious harmony....

Magic Time!: ‘The T Party’ at Forum Theatre

Natsu Onoda Power’s delightfully devised theater piece The T Party could not have a more perfect home than Michael Dove’s quintessentially inclusive Forum Theatre. At Forum every walk-up ticket is Pay...

‘The Imperative to Reconcile’: A Conversation with Ari Roth by John Stoltenberg

In the week following Ari Roth’s firing as Artistic Director of Theater J, I talked with him about his vision of theater. It was a topic that mattered to me personally, because I had come to a deep...

Magic Time! ‘Terminus’ at The Studio Theatre

Graphic language can slam us and disturb us in a way that is unique to live theater. Visceral and muscular diction in performance can burn images into our mind’s eye as no cinema can.The power of...

The Remarkable Backstory of WSC Avant Bard’s ‘A Klingon Christmas Carol’ at Theater J on December 15th at 8 PM by Marc Okrand

WSC Avant Bard will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a one-night-only staged concert reading of A Klingon Christmas Carol—Charles Dickens’s classic tale of ghosts and redemption retold in...

Magic Time! Heard About the Rainbow Theatre Project? A Q&A With Artistic Director H. Lee Gable

The Rainbow Theatre Project, Metro DC’s very own LGBTQ theatre company, has just begun its second season. If that sounds intriguing but you’ve never heard of it, small wonder. As H. Lee Gable,...

Magic Time!: ‘Someone Is Going to Come’ (a workshop production) at Scena Theatre

This is what Jon Fosse’s words sound like. When he writes it sounds like this. His characters talk in short statements. They talk and they seem to say something ordinary. They seem to. One will say...

Magic Time: ‘Toast’ at dog & ponydc

I last partook of this tasty audience-integration treat from dog&pony dc last December when I saw Toast as a workshop production in the Kogod Cradle Series. The immersive experience was all about...

Magic Time! A Conversation With ‘Yentl’ Playwright Leah Napolin

Leah Napolin’s Yentl would have to be on any short list of best plays about religion and gender—and the production now at Theater J would have to be among its finest incarnations. Based on “Yentl the...

Magic Time! ‘Metamorphosis’ at Alliance for New Music-Theatre

As a short story by Franz Kafka awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, it found itself onstage transformed into a live action graphic novel. Wait, what? Translation: The adventurous Alliance for New...

Magic Time: ‘Belleville’ at The Studio Theatre

I’ve been crazy about Amy Herzog’s writing since I saw 4000 Miles last year at Studio Theatre. When I saw After the Revolution at Theater J last season, I just flipped. Herzog is, as I said then, on...

‘Yentl’ at Theater J

In Theater J’s beautiful, eloquent, and thrilling new production of Yentl, such profound new life has been breathed into Isaac Bashevis Singer’s beloved novella that at its heart this retelling is...

A Report From Page-to-Stage: ‘Hand Jobs’

The distinctive work of playwright Alan Sharpe returned to the Page-to-Stage Festival Saturday night with a reading of six short plays collectively titled Hand Jobs, presented by the African-American...

A Report From Page-to-Stage: ‘Carved in Stone’

After the entertaining staged reading at last year’s Page-to-Stage Festival of Mario Baldessari’s comedy The Good Devil, In Spite of Himself (coauthored with Tyler Herman), I called it in my report “a...

Magic Time! Free for All at Shakespeare Theatre Company: ‘The Winter’s Tale’

William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a play I’d never seen or read or even known a thing about. So the experience of discovering it via The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s smashingly good...

Is ‘The Laramie Project’ a Convenient Untruth?

A new book about the Matthew Shepard murder challenges the theater community to reevaluate a cherished play. By JOHN STOLTENBERG

Magic Time! ‘Rodney King’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

If ever there was an Inadvertent American Hero, it’s Rodney King, the black construction worker whose brutal beating in 1991 by white cops in LA, caught on videotape, appalled the world, indicted a...

Magic Time! DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘The Laundry Room’

The DC Black Theatre Festival this year offered some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational theater company, the festival...

Magic Time! DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘7 Layers Captive’

The DC Black Theatre Festival this year offered some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational theater company, the festival...

DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘Somethin’ Like Eatonville’

The DC Black Theatre Festival, which runs through June 26, this year offers some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational...

Magic Time! The DC Black Theatre Festival: ‘Confessions of a Homo Thug Porn Star’

The DC Black Theatre Festival, which runs through June 26, this year offers some 45 self-produced shows, most one time only. Organized annually by the DC Drama Department, a nonprofit educational...

Magic Time! ‘Grounded’ at The Studio Theatre

Sometimes an extraordinary piece of theater plays like a synecdoche on steroids. It serves as a small part that represents a vast whole with astounding force. A window that lets us see something more...

‘Magic Time!’ ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ at The American Century Theater

A resounding round of applause is owed The American Century Theater (TACT), whose sharp, smart production of Judgment at Nuremberg brings this towering play to DC Metro audiences at last. As Artistic...

An Interview With Kieyontaye D. Johnson-Carter, Author of ‘Love in Time of HIV’

When I first saw Love in Time of HIV in May 2012, I was deeply impressed. Giving voice to a young generation’s encounter with the health crisis left them by their elders, the play by Kieyontaye D....

Magic Time! ‘Cock’ at The Studio Theatre

If this were a theater review it would be an effusive rave. The production of Mike Bartlett’s play Cock now at The Studio Theatre is impeccable: The lighting, the sound, the direction, the casting,...

Magic Time! ‘The Threepenny Opera’ at Signature Theatre

Signature Theatre’s new production of The Threepenny Opera—directed and choreographed with unerring cunning by Matthew Gardiner—is cringe-inducing, snarky, impudent, and jarring. Everything it’s meant...

A Report on ‘Jarman (all this maddening beauty)’ at force/collision

For as long as there have been movies, theater artists have tried to integrate film with live performance. Something about celluloid (these days, video) seems to inspire theater artists to break the...

‘Magic Time!’: ‘Moth’ at The Studio Theatre’s 2ndStage

Up on the fourth floor of The Studio Theatre is a great big black box of a performance space, which isn’t actually black because its walls are cinder block, rather like an institutional enclosure. On...

‘Golda’s Balcony’ at Theater J

There’s not a long list of great actors who, through their indelible bravura depiction of a great historical figure in a solo performance, warrant substituting the word “is” for “as,” in billing like...

Magic Time! ‘Arguendo’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company by John Stoltenberg

Watching Arguendo—an actual Supreme Court transcript staged cheekily for chuckles by Elevator Repair Service, the New York–based troupe specializing in literary vérité—is like watching a 70-minute...

‘If/Then’ at The Richard Rodgers Theatre

If/Then, the musical with the biggest heart you can imagine, is now back home in the Big Apple, and just like its main character, Elizabeth (the incomparable Idina Menzel), it is starting over in...

Magic Time! ‘Hair’ at The Keegan Theatre

When I saw the original Broadway production of Hair in the late sixties, my hair was shoulder length, and the slogan “Make love not war!” referred to pacifism pre-9/11 and fluid exchange pre-AIDs....

‘Normal’ at Molotov Theatre Group

Molotov Theatre Group has an uncanny knack for converting its tiny black-box nook into an auditorium-scale operating theater for surgical dissection of the dark side of human nature. With its new...

‘American Idiot’ at The National Theatre by John Stoltenberg

Among the exhilarating pleasures of seeing American Idiot now on tour at the National Theatre is experiencing this angsty, amped-up ode to antiestablishment disaffection performed full force in DC’s...

Magic Time! ‘Mother Courage and Her Children’ at Arena Stage at The Mead Center for American Theater by John Stoltenberg

It takes a wagonload of courage to take on Brecht these days. His “alienation effect” esthetic challenges every theatrical convention that makes a show a contemporary commercial success. He explicitly...

‘Yellow Face’ at Theater J by John Stoltenberg

If there was an open casting call for the role of you, who should get the part and who shouldn’t? Must the actor be descended from a gene pool that arose in the same area on the globe that yours did?...

Playing (with) Gender in WSC Avant Bard’s ‘Orlando’: Acting Insights from Sara Barker and Jay Hardee by John Stoltenberg

Orlando, WSC Avant Bard’s upcoming production, is based on Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel in which Woolf based the character Orlando on the woman she was madly in love with. In both the book and...

Magic Time! ‘Miss Nelson is Missing’ by John Stoltenberg

I had not been to kid’s theater since I was a kid. As an inveterate theater buff, I was dimly aware there was much highly praised professional children’s theater in the DC Metro area—but I was certain...

Magic Time! ‘The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess’ at The National Theatre by John Stoltenberg

History hit an astounding “rewind” and “refresh” button last night at The National Theatre. An abundantly assorted audience of Washingtonians rose as one to applaud an iconic work of musical theater...

‘Seasonal Disorder’ at Washington Improv Theater by John Stoltenberg

Washington Improv Theater has been tickling DC audiences for 15 years. When I discovered the madcap company a while ago, I got hooked on the spot. Hooked as in addicted. Feeling the need for a...

dog & pony dc’s ‘Toast’ (a Workshop Production) by John Stoltenberg

“Audience integration” is a buzzword that has been flying around awhile but only recently landed in my brain. In live theater, it means going beyond removing the fourth wall; it means erasing the line...

‘Man in a Case’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company by John Stoltenberg

It is one thing to amble through a modern art gallery and appreciate an innovative multimedia installation—some videos and audio here, some projections and lighting effects there, perhaps some human...

Magic Time! Reflections on ‘Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie’ by John Stoltenberg

Hootenanny is a word one hardly hears anymore. Whole generations have come along for whom it elicits blank stares and a big ”Huh?” The press release for Woody Sez: The Life & Music of Woody Guthrie...

‘If/Then’ (Revisited) by John Stoltenberg

The first time I saw If/Then, I knew I would be seeing it again. The show’s beauty, originality, and heart won me over, and that experience increased all the way through. I wrote a review for...

Magic Time! Reflections on ‘Mies Julie’ by John Stoltenberg

On the evidence of Mies Julie, Yael Farber, who wrote and directed it, must be counted among the most important theater artists on the world stage today. Beyond brilliant: important. Rarely have I...

‘Magic Time!’ ‘The Laramie Project’ at Ford’s Theatre by John Stoltenberg

If you’re a theater buff who’s worried that the shutdown’s shuttering of Ford’s Theatre and the shunting of The Laramie Project to a nearby church means audiences there must be getting something...

Magic Time!: ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by John Stoltenberg

The notorious aesthete Oscar Wilde believed that beauty is be-all and end-all. After The Painting of Dorian Gray met with moral outrage upon its publication in 1890, he appended a Preface to the novel...

‘The Velocity of Autumn’ at Arena Stage at The Mead Center for American Theater by John Stoltenberg

For $64,000, the funny thing about aging is…? Funny like strange or funny like—? Like LOL. Oh, okay, lemme think. [Thinks a long time; lame music plays.] Haven’t got all day. Please, I need more time!...

Magic Time: ‘Molière’s Don Juan’ at Faction of Fools by John Stoltenberg

On top of the antic hilarity in Faction of Fools’ new production of Molière’s Don Juan, I had the funny feeling while watching this company’s work for the first time that I’d been a fool for having...

‘After the Revolution’ at Theater J by John Stoltenberg

Who would have guessed that a family drama about everyday ethics and far-left ideology could be so engrossing and engaging, the characters so real and riveting, that what happens on stage enters one’s...