Reviews

Review: ‘Grease’ at the John W. Engeman Theater

Grab your leather jacket and go back in time to Rydell High, 1959 in Grease. The John W. Engeman Theater at Northport has opened its 2017-2018 season with this much loved classic, and it’s fabulous....

Review: ‘Annie’ at Westchester Broadway Theatre

Westchester Broadway Theatre is currently presenting Annie, and this production, directed and choreographed by Mary Jane Houda, is enjoyment and smiles from start to finish. In 1970 Martin Charnin was...

Review: ‘Chicago’ at ArtsCentric at Motor House

The city of Chicago is “Hog Butcher for the World… City of the Big Shoulders,” as poet Carl Sandburg wrote just over a 100 years ago. Much the same could be said of certain elements of the press,...

Review: ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers’ at the Summer Dinner Theatre at Montgomery College

In 1850 Oregon, Adam Pontipee (a velvety-voiced Da’Von Moody) has come to town to trade some furs and look for a bride. We know he’s a romantic because his opening song is “Bless Your Beautiful Hide”...

Review: ‘Barefoot in the Park’ at The Candlelight Theatre

Six days do not a week make. These famous words of nonsense, uttered by the young wife Cory, will tell all serious theatergoers that they are in the domain of Neil Simon and his oft-performed...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’

Imagine a bird emoji tweeting. No, it’s not another bizarre White House official message. The Hodgepodge Group has adapted Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It would be wise to be have read the...

Review: ‘An Octoroon’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company (remount)

Honestly, I am still reeling after seeing Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins’ An Octoroon last night. I’ve been wandering around the house all morning, eyes glazed over, wheels turning in my head while my family...

Review: ‘New York – The Melting Pot’ at Soulpepper on 42nd Street

The first in Soulpepper Theatre Company’s three-part musical celebration of the history of diversity in New York – The Melting Pot pays tribute to Lower Manhattan, from Battery Park to Chelsea....

Review: ‘to tell my story: a hamlet fanfic’ at The Welders at Silver Spring Black Box Theater

Maybe the only way the play Hamlet could ever make sense is to filter it through a teenaged girl perspective. Watching a 30-year-old man galumph and philosophize his way through Elsinore – casually...

Movie Review: ‘Landline’

Landline, the latest from Gillian Robespierre and Elisabeth Holm, the creative team behind Obvious Child, opens with the sounds of… rutting, I guess is the word I can use in a family publication. The...

Review: The Kinsey Sicks in ‘Things You Shouldn’t Say’ at Theater J

There’s virtually nothing a drag queen won’t say, or do, in public or private, say the Kinsey Sicks. The San Francisco-based beauty shop quartet that puts the show into show business, the bawdy into...

Review: ‘The Mark of Cain’ at Synetic Theater

Fans of Synetic Theater’s music-and movement-based works derived from classic texts will find a surprise twist in the company’s latest offering. Typically, a Synetic extravaganza creates a vivid other...

Review: ‘Night Tide’ at the New York Musical Festival

Ancient sea lore meets Sixties beach party in Night Tide, a new musical parody by Taylor Tash (book and lyrics) and Nathania Wibowo (music), based on Curtis Harrington’s 1961 B-movie thriller of the...

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘Welcome to Fear City’

Fear City is the South Bronx in July 1977. There is nothing particularly unique about that July in that year in that place. Fear, it seems, is a way of life in the South Bronx. Kara Lee Corthron’s...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Portraits of GRRRLs

The production of Portraits of Grrrls felt like I walked into a high school guidance counselor’s activity. This should not diminish the discussions, content, importance, and impact this activity has,...

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘Everything Is Wonderful’

The Amish with their horse and buggy, 19th century culture; their simple, old world uniforms and habits; their infamous Rumspringa where the teenage Amish is given the opportunity to choose between...

New Records: Listening to ‘Groundhog Day’ and ‘Hello, Dolly!’

New Records is our column about recordings of shows and concerts. It’s a companion to the reviews that regularly appear here on DC Theater Arts. This month we take a look at albums from two more shows...

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘The Niceties’

Eleanor Burgess’ The Niceties is a political play that takes the gloves off. It’s bare knuckled and it’s bloody, though no bones are broken and no souls crushed. But who knows what tomorrow will...

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...

Review: ‘The Tempest’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a colorful, spirited spectacle. Co-directed by Donald Hicken and Sally Boyett, The Tempest is performed outdoors, in the...

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘Byhalia, Mississippi’

Evan Linder‘s Byhalia, Mississippi pulls theatre-goers into familiar territory: the “white trash” world of Laurel and Jim. Once there, however, the unfamiliar takes shape: amidst the gutter talk, the...

Review: ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee’ at McLean Community Players

Oh the years of awkward adolescence. Who doesn’t look back on that time and cringe? No one! Which is why The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee is the perfect combination of hilarity and...

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘We Will Not Be Silent’

David Meyers’ We Will Not Be Silent places American audiences within an interrogation room in Nazi Germany in 1943. Leaders of the White Rose, one of several resistance groups to Hitler and his Third...

Review: ‘Tick Tick… BOOM!’ at Stillpointe Theatre

Before the emergence of the late legendary composer and playwright Jonathan Larson’s iconic Rent on Broadway, there was his semi-autobiographical rock monologue Tick, Tick… Boom! that he performed on...

Review: ‘Bon Voyage! A Happenstance Escapade’ at Round House Theatre

Sunny and cheerful is how I felt after an hour or so with Happenstance Theater’s Bon Voyage! A Happenstance Escapade. The original production, currently at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, made this...

Review: ‘The Three Musketeers’ at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival

The Three Musketeers has been dramatized countless times over the past two centuries, and for a good reason – it’s a rousing tale filled with intrigue, swordplay, appealing characters, and lots of...

Review: ‘Wig Out!’ at Studio Theatre

The world of Wig Out! is a glittering fantasia on house ballroom culture. Tarell Alvin McCraney’s ingeniously metatheatrical 2006 script sets this play with music in the urban underground that came to...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Trey Parker’s Cannibal! The Musical’

A man wanders onstage, a mad look above his riotous beard. Another man comes on, petrified with fear, not seeing the disturbing maniac. With lightning speed, the bearded man pounces and tears a...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Lakeboat’

Lakeboat was thought controversial when it debuted 40 years ago, but now it seems almost quaint, verging on classy. The very first script by David Mamet, it features many of the hallmarks of his...

Review: ‘Night Seasons’ at Quotidian Theatre Company

Horton Foote, the Oscar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of hundreds of plays for stage and screen, was known as the American Chekhov. As such, his work is a perfect choice for The Quotidian Theatre....

Review: Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF): ‘Wild Horses’

Last year there was Not Medea; this year there is Wild Horses, Allison Gregory’s rollicking one-woman ride through a 13-year-old’s adventures in horse country. Though structurally not as well defined...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘P.I.C. : The Prison Industrial Complex’

With P.I.C. : The Prison Industrial Complex, the Conciliation Project hits the cruelty of the American criminal justice system hard with just about everything they can throw at it: Scores of...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Lancer & Lace’

What would have happened if Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination had failed – but the danger wasn’t over? Lancer and Lace pulls on this historical thread and weaves an interesting yet uneven tale of...

Review: ‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill’ at Anacostia Playhouse

“These are my friends,” Billie Holiday (Anya Nebel) tells her accompanist (LeVar Betts), gesturing at the audience. It is March of 1959, and Holiday will be dead in four months. She’s singing at...

Review: ‘Oklahoma!’ at Prince William Little Theatre

Feel jaunty and energized after Prince William Little Theatre’s production of Oklahoma!. Enter into a land of wide open prairie fields, great company and even greater gossip. This cheery town blooms...

Review: ‘King John’ at 4615 Theatre Company

Scandals, sibling rivalry, adultery and divorces represented daily living for England’s royal Plantagenet family, which held the dynastic reigns of power from approximately 1120 to 1490. The...

Review: ‘Oblivion’ at Unexpected Stage Company

“Games have rules,” Brooklyn-parent Dixon (Zach Brewster-Geisz) tells his wife, Pam (Mindy Shaw). They’re playing Boggle, Dixon has tried to play “Slurpee,” and both are a little wounded that their...

Review: ‘Hairspray’ at Fredericktowne Players

A transformation is underway in Frederick Maryland’s local theater community. Nowhere is that more evident than inside the JBK Theater, watching the Fredericktowne Players (FtP) latest production of...

Review: ‘The Gun Show’ at 1st Stage

Among the issues polarizing America (and degrading public discourse) is the hot-button question of what to do about guns. Proponents of positions right and left talk past each other. Both camps have...

Review: ‘Alligator Pie’ at Soulpepper on 42nd Street

Adapted from the verses of beloved children’s book author and poet Dennis Lee – known to generations of fans as “Canada’s Father Goose” – Soulpepper Theatre Company’s ensemble-devised Alligator Pie,...

Review: ‘Cage’ at Soulpepper on 42nd Street

The avant-garde work and Zen convictions of 20th-century American composer John Cage are the inspiration for Soulpepper Theatre Company’s ensemble-devised piece Cage, performed in this month’s...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Think Before You Holla’

Ally Theatre Company’s second-ever production is radically different from the first, Miz Martha Washington, a darkly comedic historical play. Conceived and directed by Taylor Reynolds from art series,...

Review: ‘The Lion in Winter’ at 4615 Theatre Company

The Lion in Winter, written by James Goldman and directed by Jordan Friend, opened this weekend at The Highwood Theatre in Silver Spring; it is being performed in repertory with King John. The play is...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Numesthesia’

“Torture numbers,” author Gregg Easterbrook once wrote, “and they’ll confess to anything.” David S. Kessler, a masterful storyteller aided by onstage musicians and projections in his new show,...

Review: ‘Monty Python’s SPAMALOT’ at Rockville Musical Theatre

Top-notch performers, frequent laughter, applause, audience sing-alongs, and an all-in standing hymn recital characterized a night at Rockville Musical Theatre’s production of Monty Python’s SPAMALOT....

Review: ‘Teresa’ at Seventh Street Playhouse

Now playing at Greenbelt Arts Center (GAC), Seventh Street Playhouse’s Teresa is a thought-provoking, historical dramedy written by Anthony Ernest Gallo and inspired by the life of Saint Teresa of...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘My Lack of a Social Life’

Douglas Stafford is a very talented juggler. If that is an interest of yours, if you like juggling, and you’ve got an hour, then you may like this show. Stafford is pretty good as a magician. If you...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Changeling Child’

A marketing company might have taken The Coil Project’s The Changeling Child and instead titled it A Midsummer Night’s Dream – The Next Generation. That title better conveys the substance and kitschy...

Review: ‘Spider’s Web’ at Princeton Summer Theater

Spider’s Web ends with the unmasking of a murderer, and it starts with… a taste test. In this play’s opening moments, two veddy proper, blindfold-wearing English gentlemen drink glasses of Port and...

Review: ‘Cabaret’ at The Kennedy Center

Cabaret, the blistering musical satire written more than 50 years ago by John Kander and Fred Ebb, stormed into The Kennedy Center this week with a performance that had the audience on its feet, and...