Reviews

Review: ‘Legally Blonde’ at the Keegan Theatre

In this summer of our discontent – what with unchecked climate change, racist politics, and mass murders – a bit of cheer in the form of a frothy tale of a privileged white girl who, through dint of...

Review: ‘Or,’ by Theatre Prometheus at Capital Hill Arts Workshop

Liz Duffy Adams’s play Or,—which premiered in 2009 at the Women’s Project in New York—is a deliciously literate feminist farce. A radical mashup of dichotomies (among them straight and gay, male and...

Review: ‘Young Frankenstein’ by Other Voices Theatre

IT ALIVE! Other Voices Theatre brings not only a monster, but also a fantastic evening of laughter, to life with their production of Mel Brooks’ musical Young Frankenstein. If you love Mel Brooks’...

In The Moment: Kimberly Gilbert Is King In ‘Bootleg Shakespeare, Richard III’

Once again, Taffety Punk Theatre Company has succeeded at challenging the theatrical status quo. This time, it was with a mesmerizing Bootleg Shakespeare Richard III. Under the open-eyed, “the...

Review: ‘South Pacific’ at Riverside Center for the Performing Arts

Riverside Center for the Performing Arts presents Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific. The winner of multiple Tony awards, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, South Pacific continues to charm...

Review: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ by Baltimore Shakespeare Factory

Baltimore Shakespeare Factory’s (BSF) production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Tom Delise, delivers the “merry” promised in the title. The wives – Alice Ford (Emily Classen) and Margaret...

Review: ‘Bootleg Shakespeare: Richard III’ by Taffety Punk Theatre Company at the Folger Theatre

Taffety Punk’s Bootleg Shakespeare, a beloved DC tradition, is like attending a party with dozens of friends you never knew you had. The lines are long. The audience is enthusiastic. And the acting is...

Review: ‘Volta’ by Cirque du Soleil

It always sparks joy when Cirque du Soleil comes to town, and its latest Big Top production, Volta, is a crazy-wondrous delight. The show is inspired by amateur street sports, and its theme is the...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Starcrossed’

Starcrossed is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet with a new pair of starcrossed lovers: Mercutio and Tybalt. Worked seamlessly within the dialogue and story of the original work, these...

Review: ‘Disney’s Newsies’ by Encore Stage & Studio at Kenmore Middle School Theatre

Encore Stage & Studio’s “Theatre by Kids, for Kids!” is currently showing the Disney musical, Newsies. Based on the 1992 movie, and inspired by the real-life newsboy strike in 1899, the story takes...

Review: ‘Aladdin’ at The Kennedy Center

Ever since The Lion King took the Broadway world by storm back in 1997, Disney has been recreating its beloved animated films for the stage, with successful runs by The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the...

Dispatches from Mike Daisey’s ‘A People’s History,’ Chapters 1 to 18

Over 16 days in Washington, DC, in July 2019, Mike Daisey gave 18 different performances, each about an hour and 45 minutes long, of his epic look at America’s past, present, and future. He drew from...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Inferno the Musical’

“Heaven is so boring.” That’s the complaint of a modern-day version of Dante Alighieri in Inferno the Musical, a look at the vagaries of life and love and the inevitability of fate. Written and...

Review: ‘Tiger Style!’ at Olney Theatre Center

Buy your ticket today for a rich palette of cultural and political satire. Olney Theatre Center’s Tiger Style! is the best stage comedy I’ve seen in 2019. Directed by Natsu Onoda Power, a major theme...

Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy for Classical Acting Presents Three Plays in Rep

Where can you find one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, most passionate “problem plays,” and most famous tragedies, performed with conviction and flair? At the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy...

In the Moment: ‘The Happiest Place on Earth’ at 1st  Stage

With a return visit to The Happiest Place on Earth, new gemstones are uncovered, adding complexity and currency to its bittersweet tale about dreams that a heart makes. In its current incarnation as...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘SPEAK*Girls Presents’

The true critic of this year’s second annual SPEAK*Girls Presents is a thirteen-year-old young woman, who shared at the rousing end of this year’s production, “I’m hard to impress, and I loved it.”...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘If These Balls Could Talk’

There’s plenty of beef in Carolann Valentino’s one-woman musical, If These Balls Could Talk, about her life as a young actress from Texas working at a steakhouse in New York. This was not just any old...

Review: ‘Ann’ at Arena Stage

If you are a fan of Ann Richards, the straight-talking, liberal Governor of Texas from 1991 to 1995, or alternatively, if you were living on the opposite side of the globe and somehow missed coverage...

Review: ‘Hamlet’ at the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free for All

Hamlet is the most produced play in the world. It is said that Hamlet is being performed somewhere every single minute of every single day. Now, the Shakespeare Theatre Company is presenting a superb...

Review: ‘Seussical’ by McLean Community Players at Alden Theatre

Based on the fantastical imaginings of Dr. Seuss, Seussical is a light-hearted musical packed with color, magic, and mischief. McLean Community Players is running their production of this...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Home, Sweet, _____’

Home, Sweet, _____ takes audiences on a sentimental journey through music, sight gags, and pantomime. Without words, Home, Sweet, _____ tells the story of a clown, the frenetic Collette Campbell,...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Acuña Acuna’

Whenever Erick Acuña is asked to play Peruvian music, he launches into a burst of rock. Why not, he wonders, since rock is his country’s favorite sound. But rock is not what his hosts expect. No...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Little White Lies’

Four performers appear from unexpected places. Emerging from hallways, stairways and around corners with a rippling and tribal urgency, the movement of the dancers is steered by Y-shaped divining...

Review: ‘LadyM’ by The Welders

When the audience enters the performance space at Joe’s Movement Emporium, they are confronted by three women in period clothing (costumes designed by Julie Cray Leong, assisted by Kyla Carney). The...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘All for the Union’

15 actors. 20 scenes. The Civil War. A lot is at stake in All for the Union, written by the prize-winning playwright, librettist, and historian Meredith Bean McMath and directed by Jenna Powell, and...

Review: ‘The Explorers Club’ at Prologue Theatre

New companies, and especially hybrid troupes whose members have a variety of artistic origins and talents, are a vital part of DC’s theatrical ecosystem. The past few years have seen the launch of...

Review: ‘The Things They Carried’ at the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage

The Things They Carried is a personal people’s history. A sharply conjured chronicle. It is told at the most granular of levels by a platoon of characters. Performed solo by David Sitler, the...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Arcade’

Arcade is unlike anything you will experience at Fringe. Equal parts art installation, gaming experience, and nostalgia, Arcade perfectly encapsulates the feeling of walking into a 1980s arcade. The...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Iphigenia in Splott’

Set in a blighted corner of Wales, Iphigenia in Splott is a breathtaking one-woman show, imported from the UK and written by Gary Owen, a Welsh playwright and winner of the Meyer-Whitworth Award for...

Review: ‘The Few’ by Unexpected Stage Company

The American interior West has long been a favored setting for stories about loneliness. The visual emptiness of vast open spaces – think of your favorite John Ford film – and the emotional distance...

Review: ‘The Mollusc’ by Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center

If you’re in the mood for a drawing-room comedy exploring the social habits of the British upper class in the Edwardian era, Bethesda’s Quotidian Theatre Company should be on your list. Quotidian is...

Review: ‘The Winter’s Tale’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Summer and Shakespeare are two very different things that somehow seem to go perfectly together. Every summer, theater companies all over the country dust off their British accents and take The Bard...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Knights of Salisbury’

The Knighthood Players’ Production of The Knights of Salisbury, by Tim Caron, directed by Tim Caron and Ilyana Rose-Davila, with music direction by Jason Schoenfeld, is a nostalgic, though awkward and...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘American Diet’

Here’s a show description you don’t see often: “A dark yet whimsical exploration of food, fitness, body image, and metabolic endocrinology.” And I will say, that’s no lie. In American Diet’s 45 minute...

Review: ‘Be More Chill’ at Monumental Theatre Company

If you can’t get to the Broadway sensation Be More Chill, which closes August 11, there is no need to despair. Monumental Theatre Company is presenting the DMV’s first professional version of this...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘EyeSOAR’

EyeSOAR is primarily a dance performance which incorporates video, audio interviews, music, and the spoken word to tell the story of the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. This...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Beyond These Walls’

Beyond These Walls is a provocative contribution to the Capital Fringe, and well worth seeing. It was originally devised in 2018 under the direction of Matt Bassett, Artistic Director of the Hub...

Review: ‘Joy Rebel’ at the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage

Joy Rebel, written and performed by Khanisha Foster, is a moving, deep dive into fluid identity and the fraught experiences of a mixed-race human being. Joy Rebel is a revealing autobiographical...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘This Place of Ours’

When done well, dance has a unique ability to tell a compelling narrative through themes that audience members can then adapt to their own perspectives and stories. Moving Body Dance Company has...

Review: ‘American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables’ by The Hub Theatre

Playwright Sam Hamashima is described in his program bio as working in the “collision between his queer identity and his Japanese-American identity.” In American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables,...

2019 Capital Fringe Review ‘What Wasn’t’

By Rebecca Kurtz Perhaps it is a matter of personal preference that at Fringe I am often more taken by the comedies than by the dramas. The intensely self-involved process of making and performing a...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Nothing Broken’

Nothing Broken is an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Amanda Haddock, directed by Cathy Reinking. It tells the story of Hope, who is grappling with the end of her ten year...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: The Little Senator That Could

The Little Senator That Could held its world premiere at Capital Fringe on July 12, 2019, and it is nearly perfect for Washington, DC. Billed as a comedy, playwright Kirsten Grady’s show is actually a...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Six Months of Winter’

By Helen Ganley Conjuring up images of day and night, one imagines the sun cascading into a pink and purple horizon while the moon excitedly and stoically takes its place in the sky. The picture, in...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Good & Kissed’

Ladies, grab your closest friends, make a post-show dinner reservation, and head to Capital Fringe’s Good & Kissed for a night out that will make you laugh, cry, and spur your own stories of loss and...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Flirting Like an American’

George Washington University researcher Sufian Zhemukhov is a popular guy around Washington. He has several awards for his storytelling and some of the stories he relies on in Flirting Like an...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘She Sings Light’

She Sings Light, written by Claudia Rosales-Waters and directed by Josh Sticklin, is one of four ‘curated’ shows in the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival. That means that this highly symbolic drama—which...

Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ at The Kennedy Center

“All alone in the quiet /And my ears are thirsty / For your voice, for your voice / Can you answer me.” Those lyrics from The Band’s Visit’s “Answer Me” burrowed into my heart as I took in The Band’s...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Conversations’

One of the more common phenomena of fringe festivals like ours is to see young actors commit to intensely personal projects, creating a cohesive performance piece that celebrates and reflects on their...