DC

Review: ‘The Devil’s Music’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

It’s no coincidence that The Devil’s Music – the show that celebrates the life and song of Bessie Smith – blew into Washington’s bustling H Street district at roughly the same time that Hurricane...

Magic Time!: ‘The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith’ at Mosaic Theater Company

In what is surely the most badass, take-no-prisoners performance by a musical artist on a DC stage in recent memory, Miche Braden brings her sensational star turn as Bessie Smith to H Street, belting...

Review: ‘The Wizard of Hip’ at MetroStage

Yesterday may be far away for some; but a high-spirited comic primer of one male’s vainglorious attempts to be “hip” and his bewilderment at all things relating to women awaits from the exuberant,...

Review: The American Pops Orchestra Presents ‘Season 3 Opening Celebration! With Marilyn Maye’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

Luke Frazier, American Pops Orchestra founder and Music Director, kicked off the Orchestra’s third season with a delightful concert featuring acclaimed jazz legend, Marilyn Maye. Maye was backed by a...

Review: Free For All ‘Othello’ at the Shakespeare Theatre Company

Every great play by Shakespeare takes on altered shades of meanings depending on a production’s directing, design, and acting. That’s a theater truism. Also well-known to practitioners is that...

Review: ‘Whipping, or The Football Hamlet’ at Longacre Lea

What a rush. DC area playwright Kathleen Akerley has aced her way through the hottest of “au courant” identity politics in her newest work, the penetrating Whipping, or the Football Hamlet. With...

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...

Review: Herbie Hancock at The Kennedy Center

Legendary Oscar and multi-Grammy-winning pianist and Kennedy Center Honoree Herbie Hancock solidified his avant-garde artistry on the Concert Hall stage Tuesday night, highlighting “smatterings” of...

Review: ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ featuring Tom Teasley at Constellation Theatre Company

When The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari hit German movie screens in 1920, it baffled and delighted audiences who had primarily been entertaining themselves with annual Film Festivals of Fred Ott’s sneeze and...

Magic Time!: ‘Big Fish’ at The Keegan Theatre

The musical Big Fish is by any measure a feel-good show for the whole family, as evidenced by the buoyant and beautiful production now playing at The Keegan Theatre. But the main narrative arc in Big...

Review: ‘Big Fish’ at The Keegan Theatre

Family-friendly musicals are relatively rare these days. Family-friendly musicals that have adult themes are even rarer. Big Fish, with book by John August and music and lyrics by Andrew Lippa, is a...

Magic Time!: Sweet Spot Aerial Productions’ ‘Smoky Mirrors’ at Atlas Performing Arts Center

No sooner did some aerial apparatus drop from the fly space—ropes, straps, silks, hoops, trapezes—but what some artist-athletes would take hold of it and make acts of suspended animation. These...

Benefit: ‘One Night in Bangkok’ Featuring Members of ‘The King and I’ to Benefit Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS on August 14

Join members of The King and I’s royal court as they step out of character for good fun and a good cause at One Night in Bangkok, a one-night only cabaret benefit for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS...

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...

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...

Review: ‘The King and I’ at The Kennedy Center

Swapping one beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein’s national tour production for another, the Tony Award-winning Lincoln Center Theater revival of The King and I made its Washington, D.C. premiere at 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: 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 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: ‘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: ‘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...

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...

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...

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...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Proper Care of the Peace Lily’

There are no absolutes in Proper Care of the Peace Lily. In this 100-minute performance, everything exists in relation: analogies, power differentials, and those actual familial relations that define...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Regulars’

By far the best show I have seen at Fringe so far this year, The Regulars will have you laughing in your seat, squealing at insider “DC” jokes and dancing in the aisles, (Really, be prepared. They...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Shinka’

The post World War II Japanese dance theatre form, Butoh, is traditionally performed in white body make-up. Slow controlled movement, body tension and muscular involvement may rely on elaborate...

Review: ‘The Originalist’ at Arena Stage at The Mead Center for American Theater

The original The Originalist returns to Arena in a much larger house (The Kreeger, not the Kogod Cradle where it debuted in 2015). This is fitting. The play, the performances, and the production are...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Repentance’

A light night of theater Repentance is not. In one uninterrupted dialogue that unfolds over the course of 90 minutes, Repentance tells a story of mental anguish, power games and abuse. William Aitken...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Kara Sevda’

Let’s get this part out of the way quickly: Lisa VillaMil’s Kara Sevda (at Shopkeepers through July 22) is an exhilarating piece of theater, masterfully and assuredly directed by Kat Haan, beautifully...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Dancing Through Life…By the Way’

Dancing Through Life…By the Way is a one-man show starring Christopher Bennett. No director is credited in the Playbill, but it appears that Mr. Bennett did the majority of the heavy lifting here. He...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Arden Now’

“My employer is an asshole.” Shakespeare said that. Ok, not exactly. But the Rude Mechanicals somehow fit the line seamlessly into Arden Now, their abbreviated and modified – yet still spoken in verse...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘ClickB@it’

Internet addiction is no laughing matter. However, for the talented team now lighting up the stage at the Sprenger Theatre at Atlas, the Internet–and all the craziness it has produced–is the stuff of...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Aflight’

There is no doubt in my mind that Jane Franklin Dance’s Aflight brings something special to Fringe. Usually based in Arlington, this group blends music, dance, and visual art in a way that is not only...

Review: ‘Empanada For A Dream’ at 1st Stage

Proust may have had his mother’s madeleine, but Juan Francisco Villa has his mother’s empanada to stir up memories of his gritty, hard scrabble childhood in New York’s City’s Lower East Side. It was a...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘There Ain’t No More’

Willie Carlisle is an astonishing performer, and if I were only reviewing his performance of mountain folk music, I’d recommend this show with the entirety of my full heart. Guitar, banjo, squeeze...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Clara Bow: Becoming “It”

Though her name is no longer on the lips of an adoring public, during the height of silent film and then early talkies, Clara Bow was The It Girl, the very personification of the carefree flapper of...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear’ at Barabbas Theatre

Exit, Pursued by a Bear, produced by Barabbas Theatre for their 2017 CapFringe entry and directed by Kevin O’Connell, is a welcome DC introduction to Lauren Gunderson’s pithy, ratatat meta riff on...

Review: ‘Hick: A Love Story’ at 1st Stage

What was hidden away as a purposefully invisible sidebar of decades-old history, is brought to well-deserved notice by 1st Stage’s inaugural Logan Festival of Solo Performances. With Hick: A Love...

Review: ‘We Found the Wild Things’ at Who What Where Theater Collective

It is New Year’s Eve, 2015, and seven high school seniors have gathered at the home of the twins, Nicole (Skye Lindberg) and August (Zachary Wilcox). There’s Maisy (Catherine Anne Gilbert), quiet,...

2017 Capitol Fringe Review: ‘Show Business 101’

Welcome to show business! And welcome to Show Business 101, the comedy revue where four talented actors burst on and off the stage offering send-ups of various show biz situations, real and imaginary....

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘LIFE: A Comic Opera in Three Short Acts’

LIFE: A Comic Opera in Three Short Acts is neither quite an opera nor a musical; it is not a really a comedy or a drama. It’s a bit of everything, using classical music, Broadway, doo-wop, and more to...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Paper’

A cluttered desk, a twenty-minute appointment, a student and a teacher, and what ensues are cerebral twists and turns, well beyond the subdued, weightiness of departmental office hours. We inhabit...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Exit Carolyn’

I love Fringe. And like many theatergoers, I head off each day with tolerance and hope. The tolerance is for shows that are long on ambition, and the hope is for something more. Imagine my surprise at...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘To Be or Not To Be In Love – That Is The Question?’

Sitting in the audience of To Be or Not To Be In Love – That Is The Question?, a one-woman cabaret starring writer-choreographer Beverly Merella, might be the modern equivalent of attending a Florence...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Release: A Rock Opera’

An exciting aspect of CapFringe is getting a sneak peek at a new show in the first stage of development. Such is the case with DC Dogs’ Release: A Rock Opera, now playing at the Gallaudet University...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Tiresias’ Tits’

Tiresias’ Tits is a self-described satirical, surreal, burlesque (fun fact – the author of the ur-source material, The Breasts of Tiresias, Guillaume Apollinaire, is responsible for giving us the word...

2017 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Not Quite: Asian American by Law, Asian Woman by Desire’

See this show. Stop reading this review, click this hyperlink, buy a ticket, and see it. Don’t want to go alone? I’ll see it with you. We’ve never met before? Who cares. I’m your new best friend for...