DC

Review: ‘.d0t:: a RotoPlastic Ballet’ at Pointless Theatre Company

When you hear the phrase “futuristic dystopia where the human race has almost died out, leaving a single human and a civilization of robots,” you probably don’t think “puppets.” But Pointless Theatre...

Magic Time!: Homoeroticism and the Mother in ‘Blood Knot’: A Q&A with Director Joy Zinoman

Until I saw Blood Knot at Mosaic Theater Company, I knew the work of Director Joy Zinoman only by reputation. I had come to her legend late. And the production blew me away. Set in apartheid South...

Review: Smithsonian Associates in Collaboration with the Creativity Foundation presents the 15th Annual Benjamin Franklin Creativity Laureate Prize to Tim Robbins

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this event, but it was unlike any Smithsonian Associates’ event I’ve ever attended. It involved a laugh exercise, talks about prison reform through art, and how art...

News Release: DCMetroTheaterArts Is Here to Stay!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DCMetroTheaterArts Squelches Rumors of Closing, Announces Plan for Future Leadership and Growth Staff Rallies in Response to Founding Editor’s Diagnosis, Thanks Local Theater...

Review: The Rainbow Theatre Project Presents ‘Historias’

The Rainbow Theatre Project premiered a new work, Historias, on Monday night, a show crafted from the experiences of its remarkably talented cast members. Director Tony Koehler led his actors – Skye...

Review: ‘Brighton Beach Memoirs’ at Theater J

Though it was well-established since the 1950s that Neil Simon was a master humorist and gifted comic writer, it wasn’t quite revealed until 1983 when Brighton Beach Memoirs premiered on Broadway that...

Review: Howard University’s Spring Dance Concert: ‘Unjust’

Every time I send a reviewer to Howard University to review a show they always have this reaction: “Oh My God!!” And there were many divine moments when I saw the final perfomance of Howard...

Spine: ‘A Human Being Died That Night’ at Mosaic Theater Company

About midway through Mosaic Theater’s A Human Being Died That Night, Eugene de Kock, serving two life sentences for murder and assassination, turns to his interviewer, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and...

Review: ‘A Human Being Died That Night’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

There are moments in this gripping, challenging, and deeply thought-provoking drama when the smallest of gestures by the two actors say what the play is about more than words can. A Human Being Died...

Review: The American Pops Orchestra Presents ‘You Spin Me ‘Round: An ’80s Dance Party’ at Lisner Auditorium

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with being formulaic when the formula mixes crowd-pleasing song selections, fresh and stylish musical arrangements, and knock-out performances. That pretty much...

Review: ‘In the Next Room or the vibrator play’ at Georgetown University

I lost count of how many orgasms are in this show. They keep, um, coming and coming. And each one is performed stunningly by a student actor with such precisely differentiated paroxysms and vivid...

Review: ‘Back to Methuselah Part 3: As Far as Thought Can Reach’ at Washington Stage Guild

George Bernard Shaw loves words. Even his stage directions are wordy. He also loved ideas, philosophy, aesthetics, politics… In Back to Methuselah Part 3: As Far as Thought Can Reach, Shaw reaches...

Review: ‘Chicago’ at The Kennedy Center

Grammy Award-winning, R & B superstar Brandy Norwood brought her razzle and dazzle to the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, reprising her Broadway debut as “Roxie Hart” in the touring production of...

Review: ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ at Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater

“I am a giant surrounded by ants!” exclaimed Walter Lee Younger in a scene from A Raisin in the Sun. Walter is the embodiment of how society, family members, and internal struggle can defer dreams....

In the Moment: ‘Midwestern Gothic’ at Signature Theatre

The premise seems full of possibilities. With its moody Twin Peaks-like, arched eyebrow attitude, Midwestern Gothic tackles wasted lives, a randy adolescent woman who is questioning the “why” of her...

Review: ‘Blood Knot’ at Mosaic Theater Company of DC

South African playwright Athol Fugard’s early masterpiece, Blood Knot, has finally returned to DC. And, judging by the roaring ovation on opening night, those who can see this production during its...

Review: ‘Lucy’ at UrbanArias

As the PETA-hounded circus left town on its farewell tour, I headed to the Atlas Performing Center to see Lucy, an UrbanArias opera about an actual chimp. I was reassured to learn that no animals were...

Review: ‘Diane Rehm in Conversation’ at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History

Hosted by the Smithsonian Associates, at an event at the National Museum of Natural History, NPR host Tom Gjetlten interviewed former NPR radio host Diane Rehm about her new book, On My Own, her time...

Review: ‘Midwestern Gothic’ at Signature Theatre

A native Midwesterner myself, I was eager to see Midwestern Gothic, Signature Theatre’s new show that is being touted as Misery meets Fargo, a thriller musical in the vein of Sweeney Todd set “in the...

Review: ‘Pike St.’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Even as fear and animus split the human race asunder, great authors have reminded us for millennia that we really are all one. From the ancient Roman playwright Terrence (“I am human, and nothing...

Review: ‘King Lear’ at George Washington University

Director Leslie Jacobson has book-ended Shakespeare’s dark tragedy King Lear with lyrical and lovingly-lit tableaux of the mad king’s court as if in a fairy-tale photo op—Lear regal on his throne, his...

Review: ‘Battlefield’ at The Kennedy Center

In The Empty Space Peter Brook declared that the stage has “two rules: (1) Anything can happen and (2) Something must happen.” In Battlefield, his collaboration with Marie-Hélène Estienne, those two...

Review: Hamburg Ballet: John Neumeier’s ‘The Little Mermaid’

In this production, John Neumeier adapts the classic 1837 tale by Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid. The production, not only explores the story of a young woman who wishes to have a human...

Post-Play Palaver: ‘Three Sisters’ and ‘No Sisters’ at Studio Theatre

Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheaterArts writers who saw the same production—in this case the same two productions, Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Aaron...

Review: ‘NSO Pops: Sophisticated Ladies: 100 Years of Ella & Company’ at The Kennedy Center

Acclaimed vocalists Capathia Jenkins, Sy Smith and Montego Glover joyously hopped the A train to Harlem along with the NSO Pops in tribute to the Queen of Jazz in Sophisticated Ladies: 100 Years of...

Review: ‘Lucia di Lammermoor’ at The Catholic University of America

Who would have thought that an evening of love, ambition, betrayal, violence, and death could be so enjoyable? That is precisely what last night’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor at The Catholic...

Review: ‘Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali?’ in Collaboration with Sundance Institute Theatre Program at The Kennedy Center

Sometimes a story is so unique it needs no explanation. Sometimes a story dares you to disbelieve. Sometimes a story… Where Can I Find Someone Like You, Ali? is such a story. And as written and...

Review: ‘Les Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo’ at The Kennedy Center

Men in tights and pointe shoes ballet super seriously and have fun doing it. The all-male comic ballet company Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo returned to the Kennedy Center March 21 with a...

In The Moment: ‘The Sound is the Kicker’ in Scena’s ‘The Night Alive’

Another superior night with Irish playwright Conor McPherson, this time at Scena Theatre under Robert McNamara’s illuminating, layered direction of McPherson’s earthy, sideward glance at damaged...

Review: ‘Antigonón, un contingente épico’ at The Kennedy Center

As the audience gathers in the Eisenhower, antique footage rolls on the screen: people gathering, moving, marching. José Martí, Cuban national hero, poet, and revolutionary flashes on the screen. The...

Review: ‘Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike’ at Prince William Little Theatre by Tamela J. Ritter

It’s probably helpful to be well versed in Chekhov and Greek tragedies to understand many of the in-jokes and allusions in Christopher Durang’s 2012 Tony Award-winning play Vanya and Sonia and Masha...

Review: ‘The Night Alive’ at Scena Theatre

Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive is a story of lost souls seeking redemption, of searching for a light in the darkness. Presented by Scena Theatre, the characters’ cheeky banter...

Review: ‘Donizetti’s Don Pasquale’ at The In Series: Opera & More

Happiness is a theatrical adaptation that successfully reinvents the original. The In Series’ production of Gabriel Donizetti’s 1843 comic opera Don Pasquale, now playing at GALA Hispanic Theatre (for...

Review: ‘Three Sisters’ at The Studio Theatre

As improbable as it may sound, the plays of Anton Chekhov are vivid proof that there is such a thing as joyful melancholy. You can commune with his characters’ misfortunes and acknowledge the...

Review: ‘Mnemonic’ at Theater Alliance

Just now when the world is wracked with wave upon wave of ethnic animus—just now when our country has succumbed to xenophobia not seen on these shores for decades—there comes a work of theatrical art...

Review: ‘No Sisters’ at The Studio Theatre

A shout-out to Studio Theatre co-founder Russell Metheny, who designed the complex on 14th Street, for installing a backstage stairway connecting the dressing rooms of the second-floor Milton and the...

Review: ‘What Every Girl Should Know’ and ‘Dry Land’ in Rep at Forum Theatre

One hundred years separate the young women in What Every Girl Should Know and Dry Land, now playing in rep at Forum Theatre. In Monica Byrne’s What Every Girl Should Know, the four teenage girls are...

Review: Jay Leno at The Kennedy Center

Iconic television host, celebrated comedian and 2014 Mark Twain recipient Jay Leno returned to the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall Friday night amped to get the trifecta of St. Patrick’s Day, March...

Review: ‘Needles and Opium’ at The Kennedy Center

Sometimes the viewer of a theatrical experience can only sit in wonder at the spectacle, not because elephants dance on soccer balls or trapeze artists spiral on silken threads, but because actors sit...

Magic Time! ‘Needles and Opium’ at The Kennedy Center

When I left the Eisenhower Theater last night after witnessing this mesmerizing multimedia marvel, I had a quibble. I had just one, but it could be the most peculiar cavil I’ve ever had about a show....

A Report on Smithsonian Associates ‘Are the Cards Collapsing?: A ‘House of Cards’ Season 5 Preview’ with Professor Stef Woods

Wednesday night I did something very DC, I attended a talk on politics through the Smithsonian Associates. Not divisive politics, but pop culture politics about the show based on DC/ British politics...

Review #2: ‘Parade’ at The Keegan Theatre

Arguments have been made that the theater is supposed to be a “safe place” where patrons can go to be entertained, away from the harshness of the world. Yet there is a large(r) number of people who...

Review: ‘Cinderella: A Magical, Musical Tale’ at The American Pops Orchestra

This is what theater is all about and it was my dream when I started DCMetroTheaterArts 5 years ago-to see a venue filled with parents and kids laughing and clapping and having a great time together....

Review: ‘Ragtime’ at Ford’s Theatre

Glorious! Dazzling! Verve! Bursting at the seams with voices and stories of America’s humanity and originating dreams. These are the words I felt as Ragtime, now at Ford’s Theatre, unfolded before me....

Review #1: ‘Parade’ at The Keegan Theatre

An intriguing musical piece of consequential historical value, The Keegan Theatre’s production of the Award-winning musical Parade is unapologetically dark and honest. Based on actual events, the...

Review: ‘Coolatully’ at Solas Nua

In the fictional village of Coolatully, a quartet of characters grapple with the effects of Ireland’s newest mass emigration. The brief and heady era of the Celtic Tiger was over; a mass exodus was...

Review: ‘Marx in Soho’ at Nu Sass Productions

Nu Sass’ latest Small Batch production is Howard Zinn’s one-actor Marx in Soho. It is another highly successfully, nervy production by Nu Sass with it mantra, “strong women, great theatre.” It is...

Review: ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ at The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC

Last night, I had the pleasure to see the the Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying as performed by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC....

Review: ‘From the Mouths of Monsters’ at The Kennedy Center

From the Mouths of Monsters, a world premiere Kennedy Center commission by award-winning playwright Idris Goodwin, directed by Dougie Irvine, is a gripping, intense glimpse into the mind of...

Review: Discovery Artist in The Kennedy Center Jazz Club: Elena and Samora Pinderhughes

Siblings Elena and Samora Pinderhughes are young, both in their early 20s. Samora is a composer and pianist and sister Elena is a vocalist and flutist. Despite their youth, the pair has been creating...