Reviews

Review: The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek at MetroStage

There is a good, rather grim, chance that The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek will be Athol Fugard’s last play; well into his eighties, Fugard has wryly admitted as much in recent interviews. If that...

Review: ‘Dream House: A Rainy Day Play’ by Building Better People Productions

Building Better People Productions’ performance of Dream House: A Rainy Day Play, is a funny, clever show about the power of imagination. Written by Jeremy Gable and directed by Lynne Childress, the...

Review: ‘Marie and Rosetta’ at Mosaic Theater Company

I could well make this a one-word review: Wow. After the sensational opening of Marie and Rosetta at Mosaic last night, wow was the first word I heard from everyone I talked to, and wow was the first...

Review: ‘Romeo and Juliet’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free For All

Romeo & Juliet’s famous entreaty–“wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast”– is strikingly realized in the latest addition to Shakespeare Theatre Company’s yearly Free For All production, a...

Review: ‘Passion’ at Signature Theatre

Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, now playing at Signature Theatre, has two of the greatest songs in the composer’s brilliant portfolio – “I Wish I Could Forget You” and “Loving You” – and three complex,...

Review: ‘The Glitter Girls’ at Upcounty Theatre

The Glitter Girls, written by Mark Dunn and directed by Bruce Hirsch, is a hilarious romp through a mind game played by the wealthy Trudy Tromaine (Margaret Condon) on her “Glitter Girls”- a...

Review: ‘In the Closet’ at Rainbow Theatre Project

“It gets better” is the premise and promise of a multimedia campaign that since 2010 has tried to offer hope and encouragement to LGBTQ+ youth. The message can be life-saving. Nearly all such youth at...

Review: ‘The Interstellar Ghost Hour’ by Longacre Lea

It’s the time of the theater season for those with a taste for the offbeat and original, and time to accept the invitation for the yearly production from Longacre Lea displaying Kathleen Akerley’s...

Review: ‘Don Cristóbal’ at Pointless Theatre

Co-directors Rachel Menyuk and Eric Swartz have brought to the DC stage a truly original work with Don Cristóbal, Pointless Theatre’s last show of the 2017-2018 season. At first an obscene and...

Review: ‘Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce’ at Constellation Theatre Company

In Jonathan Dahm Robertson’s set for Constellation Theatre Company’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a collection of two-dimensional doors is depicted on the face of...

Review: ‘Happy Ending’ at Anacostia Playhouse

Happy Ending is a one-act satirical comedy written in the 1960s by Douglas Turner Ward, co-founder of the Negro Ensemble Company. He had written an op-ed for the New York Times called “American...

Review: Off the Quill’s ‘Frankenstein’

First, to avoid any confusion, let me state what this Frankenstein is not: It is not the Mel Brooks musical Young Frankenstein, with “Abby Normal” brains and creator and creation donning top hat and...

Review: ‘Disney’s Broadway Hits’ at Wolf Trap

As the summer humidity abates a bit, what better way to enjoy a summer evening than with a concert full of classic Disney songs at Wolf Trap? Disney’s “Broadway Hits” concert on Thursday, August 9,...

Review: ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ at the Keegan Theatre

Based on the novel by Robert James Waller, The Bridges of Madison County finds Francesca, a World War Two war bride from Italy, living on a farm in Winterset, Iowa in 1965 with a husband and two...

Review: ‘Legally Blonde’ at Zemfira Stage

I came to Zemfira Stage’s production of Legally Blonde as a virtual newbie, having seen neither the musical nor the 2001 Reese Witherspoon comedy film on which it was based. I knew to expect some...

Review: ‘Dinner’ at 4615 Theatre Company

Dinner is darkly hilarious, absurdist and at times psychologically frightening. The play, similar to Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, is about a dinner party gone terribly wrong. Serving under the...

Review: ‘Chicago’ at Other Voices Theatre

Chicago, now running at Other Voices Theatre in Frederick, has a long and winding history. In 1924, Chicago reporter Maurine Watkins covered the sensational trials of Belva Gaertner and Beulah Annan,...

Review: ‘The Color Purple’ at the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater

“I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it,” said the character Shug Avery in novelist Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple, which...

Review: ‘The Story of the Gun’ at Woolly Mammoth

“All you have to do is move your little finger, move your little finger, and you can change the world.” That line from Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins could well serve as an epigraph for Mike Daisey’s...

Magic Time!: ‘The Story of the Gun’ at Woolly Mammoth

Mike Daisey’s monolog The Story of the Gun is a show both hilarious and sobering, and he begins it with a wry riff on who we are who have come to see it. As he joshingly reminds us, we are liberal...

Review: ‘King John’ at Baltimore Shakespeare Factory

King John of England was not a popular ruler, and Shakespeare’s play about him is not, to put it mildly, among his most popular works; indeed, it hasn’t been performed in Baltimore since 1781. The...

Review: ‘An Irish Twist on a Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at Quotidian Theatre Company

Quotidian Theatre Company’s An Irish Twist on a Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fantastical adventure that transports Shakespeare’s classic to 1820s Ireland. This production was directed and adapted by...

Review: ‘A Chorus Line’ at Riverside Center for the Performing Arts

A Broadway musical about Broadway musicals—what could be better for theatre-lovers of all stripes? The iconic A Chorus Line truly fits the bill! It features music by Marvin Hamlisch, lyrics by Edward...

Magic Time!: ‘Dave’ at Arena Stage

You know those big live TV versions of blockbuster musicals that get broadcast decades after the show was a hit on the stage? Like, not until generations have come and gone? Well in the case of Dave,...

Review: ‘Macbeth’ at 4615 Theatre Company

Why do people commit evil, and once they have started, why can’t they stop? Now, as always, it is a question worth asking. Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays, is an exploration of this...

Magic Time!: A Report on ‘The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company’

The prodigiously imaginative performance artist Holly Bass belongs to the first generation of her family not to pick cotton for a living. I learned that startling fact as I passed through an art...

Review: ‘Bernstein at 100: A Celebration’ at Wolf Trap

What could bring luminaries from the worlds of opera, musical theatre, a cappella, jazz, dance, choral music, and symphonic music together for one night of heavenly tunes? Perhaps nothing short of...

Review: ‘Dave’ at Arena Stage

The real news getting you down? Do you have a plentitude of cares and woes hanging over your head? Are you an addicted MSNBC watcher who wants to get off the couch and away from the cell for a few...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Perfecting the Kiss’

This comedy about bad theater and inappropriate backstage behavior is just gobsmacking good. Laugh-a-minute is an underestimation. Don’t miss it. Perfecting the Kiss, a production from New York...

Review: ‘Be a Good Little Widow’ at Unexpected Stage

It’s anybody’s guess what goes through a person’s mind in their final moments. Most of us are very familiar with what goes through the mind of a person who has lost someone. This grief, in all of its...

Review: ‘The Theory of Theories’ at District of Columbia Arts Center

An unnamed academic (Cristen Stephansky), in town for a conference, lounges on a sofa taking notes for her presentation. Her host, (Karoline Troger) a similarly unnamed Austrian scholar now teaching...

Review: ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ at Synetic Theater

Synetic Theater’s admirable, family-friendly production of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is the premiere mainstage production of Synetic’s New Voice Series. For those familiar with...

Review: ‘No Time’ by Timeless Entertainment at Bowie Center for the Performing Arts

It’s been said that family is a foundation—the one area in which failure can cause permanent heartache. Director and writer Gill Nelson’s amazing stage play No Time, the tagline of which is “When...

Review: ‘RIOT!: A Celebration of Women in Comedy’ at the Kennedy Center District of Comedy Festival

Riot!: A Celebration of Women in Comedy was part of the District of Comedy Festival at the Kennedy Center, featuring a weekend of comedy including stand-up, improv, sketch, variety, podcasts, and even...

Review: ‘Harry Shearer: Up To Eleven’ at The Kennedy Center

My father first showed me This Is Spinal Tap when I was about fifteen. It was immediately one of my absolute favorite films. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times since then, tried and failed to learn...

Review: ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ by The Hypocrites at Olney Theatre Center

Once upon a time, Gilbert and Sullivan staging was – there is no other word for it – stodgy. The D’Oyly Carte opera company dominated G&S performance from the late 19th century until its 1982 death...

Review: ‘Late Night Double Feature Improv Show’ by Fells Point Corner Theatre

By Bill Kamberger Improv is life; after all, we do it every day. And since many would claim that theater is life, performing improv in a theater seems only natural. There’s a reason, though, that even...

Review: ‘Where Did We Sit On The Bus?’ at 1st Stage Tysons

Where Did We Sit On The Bus? is a solo performance that examines identity in America through the eyes and observations of a Brown young man named Brian Quijada. With his charismatic smile, playwright...

Review: ‘Pippin’ by Monumental Theatre Company

Yes, there is magic done at Monumental Theatre’s nifty production of Pippin. I am not overstating my utter enjoyment of this production. It is spunky, buoyant, and engaging from the moment the first...

Review: ‘Brahman/I’ at The Logan Festival of Solo Performance

Set in a non-descript stand-up comedy club, the 1st Stage production of Brahman/I has a clever premise: a solo performer reveals some of a human being’s most intimate details. Brahman/I is a unique...

Review: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare, directed by Sally Boyett and Donald Hicken, is being performed on the grounds of St. John’s College in the...

Review: ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ at Olney Theatre Center

Something for everybody. That’s what comes to mind when I think about the Chicago-based The Hypocrites’ whiplash-inducing, gender-flipped spin on Gibert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. Trying to...

Review: ‘The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey’ at 1st Stage Tysons

“The dark side is my beat.” These are some of the first words heard from a New Jersey detective in The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey. He is recalling a hate crime from a decade previously that...

Review: ‘Damned If You Do’ by Upright Citizens Brigade at Woolly Mammoth

By Beatrice Loayza “So, what are we seeing again?” my friend asks me at dinner prior to the show. Pause. I scrape the corners of my mind for a suitable answer, but the reality is– “I have no clue.”...

Review: ‘The House on the Hill’ at the Contemporary American Theater Festival

Aficionados of ancient tragedy will tell you that the main difference between the Romans and the Greeks was that the Romans –Seneca, especially—loved their violence served up downstage center, the...

Review: ‘Memoirs of a Forgotten Man’ at the Contemporary American Theater Festival

Let’s stop for a moment to consider how much of the grey matter we’ve got upstairs, between those infernal ears, is dedicated to memory. Even as you read this review your mind is stocking up on words...

The Ultimate Guide to Shepherdstown for the Contemporary American Theater Festival

by Allison Considine Ready for your next summer adventure or weekend getaway? Each July, the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, presents new plays in the state’s...

Review: ‘Thirst’ at The Contemporary American Theater Festival

Dystopias can be off-putting places, for those in search of more traditional fictional locales. Why would you want to begin your story in a wasteland, where everything we associate with civilization...

Review: ‘A Late Morning (In America) With Ronald Reagan’ at the Contemporary American Theater Festival

Truth be known, there is much about Ronald Reagan that is eminently unlikeable: his shameless embrace of the southern, “State’s Rights” strategy, his contempt for social welfare programs, his blind...

Review: ‘Berta, Berta’ at the Contemporary American Theater Festival

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” –William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. Of the many great moments in the late August Wilson’s Twentieth Century cycle, the most powerful one for me comes in...