DC

In ‘Aladdin,’ Iago Is The Perfect Sidekick: And No, He’s Not a Parrot Anymore

LA-based character actor Reggie De Leon brings comedic flair to the beloved Disney character Iago. ‘Aladdin’ is playing at the Kennedy Center through September 7th.

Feature: Directing ‘Ann’ at Arena Stage

Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas, and the first woman in that state to be elected in her own right, would be howling with glee if she could see the pandemonium unleashed in government today....

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...

‘A People’s History’ at Capital Fringe Will Rock Your Worldview

I remember being so bored by my high school American history class that I got a D in it. This was not normal. My report cards always had A’s and B’s. So the kindly elderly woman who taught the course,...

Arena Stage To Host 11-Hour Marathon Reading of the Mueller Report, Volume II, July 11, 2019

Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater, in association with activist and actress Jjana Valentiner, will hold a public, nonpartisan 11-hour marathon reading of Special Counsel Robert...

Review: Mark Christopher Lawrence at the DC Comedy Loft

Mark Christopher Lawrence is a comedian of myriad talents. Appearing at the Bier Baron Tavern’s Comedy Loft, Mr. Lawrence commanded the stage with an act that was multi-dimensional – and with many...

WNO’s ‘Tosca’ Serves Up Classic Opera Comfort Food Done Right

The Washington National Opera’s (WNO) fine opening night performance of Puccini’s Tosca provided an opportunity for catharsis and reflection, two things our overwrought city needs right now. My...

Review: ‘Pride & Joy: The Marvin Gaye Musical’ at The National Theatre

Spectacular. Amazing. Unforgettable. Pride & Joy is a musical that tells the little known love story of Anna Gordy Gaye (January 28, 1922 – January 31, 2014) and the legendary and iconic R&B singer,...

Theater and Policy Salon To Host Conversation with Alliance for New Music-Theatre This Saturday

The post-show Salon conversation, in partnership with the Alliance for New Music-Theatre, will take place on Saturday, May 4, at the Spooky Action Theater space at the Universalist National Memorial...

Review: ‘Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

In Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son, Playwright Psalmayene 24, Director Raymond O. Caldwell, and Founding Artistic Director Ari Roth take on the risky task of staging a well-known and...

Review: ‘Beckett Trio, Part 2’ by Scena Theatre

Ready for your Samuel Beckett fix? A fix for the lesser-known, very short-form works by the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature? If you are the least bit curious and open to a quieter form...

Interview: JaBen Early in Arena Stage’s ‘Junk’

JaBen Early is a Washingtonian through and through. His father worked at the Smithsonian, and his mother was a teacher in DC. He went to Morehouse College and Sarah Lawrence University, and studied...

‘Two Wings’ Celebrates the Music of Black America in Migration

“Pick a chord and I’ll be there,” Alicia Hall Moran told husband Jason Moran from the stage of a packed performance hall at Georgetown University. Moran, accompanying on piano, nodded in agreement....

Amanda Gookin’s Forward Music Project at Kennedy Center’s Direct Current Festival

Amanda Gookin is a cellist, a founding member of the acclaimed music group PUBLIQuartet, and, since 2015, the founder of the Forward Music Project, which commissions new multimedia works for solo...

Folger Shakespeare Library Celebrates Shakespeare’s Birthday with Annual Open House Celebration

The Folger Shakespeare Library will host its annual open house and Shakespeare birthday celebration on Sunday, April 14 beginning at 12 pm. This free, family-friendly event throws open the doors of...

Washington Bach Consort’s Noontime Cantata Series: A DC Tradition in the Making

For thirty years, the Washington Bach Consort has offered its Noontime Cantata Series to Washingtonians seeking a free musical escape in the middle of the workday, something District officials have...

Playwright Michael Hollinger to Visit Quotidian Theatre for ‘Ghost-Writer’ Talkback

Quotidian Theatre Company will have VIP guests, “Ghost-Writer” playwright Michael Hollinger and his wife, Megan Bellwoar (who originated the role of Myra), in house for a performance and after-show...

Director and Playwright Psalmayene 24 Discusses ‘Native Son’ and ‘Les Deux Noirs’

DC Theater Arts caught up with Director and Playwright Psalmayene 24 to discuss Native Son and Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son, which play in rep at the Mosaic Theater this month....

The Kennedy Center Announces Its 2019-2020 Theater Season

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today announced its 2019–2020 theater season, with more than 15 productions from New York, London, and across the globe, plus original Kennedy Center...

Review: ‘Into the Woods’ at Ford’s Theatre

I have loved Sondheim’s Into the Woods since seeing its original Broadway production. Three decades on, Ford’s Theatre’s current version carries the tradition forward proudly. For anyone unfamiliar...

Review: ‘The Seagull’ at The Wheel Theatre Company

An aspiring playwright and son loves an aspiring actress and ingenue. A famous actress and mother loves a famous writer and inconstant. Life doesn’t often provide neat parallels between generations...

Review: ‘Eugene Onegin’ at Washington National Opera

Of all the grand tear-jerkers, those epic romances that make you want to tear your heart out and roast it on the barbecue, Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin stands out. Packed with beautiful...

Ford’s Theatre Announces 2019-2020 Season

Ford’s Theatre Director Paul R. Tetreault today announced the upcoming 2019-2020 theatrical season will include the following: August Wilson’s Fences Featuring Craig Wallace and Erika Rose A Christmas...

Review: ‘Among the Dead’ at Spooky Action Theatre

Hansol Jung is an imaginative young playwright whose work focuses on feeling perpetually uprooted. Born in Jeonju, South Korea, she moved with her family to South Africa at the age of 6. When she was...

Review: ‘The Music Man’ at the Kennedy Center

We’ve got trouble, right here in the Capital City. That might be true – mind-numbingly true – but it’s not at the Kennedy Center where Jeffrey Finn has produced a charming, energetic production of...

Review: ‘The Baltimore Waltz’ at the Keegan Theatre

Anna always wanted to go to Europe. See the City of Lights. Drink a pint of authentic German beer. Have a rendezvous (or two, or five) with strange men who whisper unintelligible sweet nothings into...

Review: ‘Admissions’ at Studio Theatre

It’s an odd thing, as a Latina here in Washington, D.C., to observe the mental wrestlings of liberal white folks struggling to come to terms with their privilege. How in muted voices they make sure to...

Theater J Names Jojo Ruf New Managing Director

Theater J, the nation’s pre-eminent professional Jewish theater, announced yesterday that Jojo Ruf will become its new Managing Director on January 28, 2019. Ruf joins Artistic Director Adam Immerwahr...

American Opera Is Becoming Its Own Genre and It’s Happening Here in DC

Opera in America has had the stink of death upon it for some time now. Lavish productions of period piece love stories and power struggles set largely during the time of kings and courtesans in Europe...

Review: ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ at Keegan Theatre

Capitalism. Exploitation. Greed. It’s the holiday season, folks, and your kids shouldn’t lose out on the fun. At Keegan Theatre’s The Elves and the Shoemaker, they won’t. Written by Kristin Walter and...

‘Talley’s Folly’ Dances Through the Holiday Season at Theater J

Talley’s Folly – now in its final week at GALA Hispanic Theatre on 14th Street – is a waltz. Meaning, it’s not a salsa. And it’s not a hustle, a tango or even a hot pasodoble. On the other hand, it’s...

Review: The Gay Men’s Chorus Holiday Show

The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC presented their annual Holiday Show on a cold winter’s night and the warmth exuded by this very polished and respected chorus obliterated any bitter winds. Since...

Review: ‘Beetlejuice’ at the National Theatre

You can’t miss Betelgeuse. A star in the constellation Orion, this supergiant is red as flame and one of the 10 brightest stars in the night sky. At approximately 10 million years old, Betelgeuse...

Kelsey Hunt Dresses the Stars in Ford’s Frothy Revival of ‘Born Yesterday’

“Born Yesterday is a winner.” Those are the words of my colleague, David Siegel, whose review of the gloriously effervescent comedy that just opened at Ford’s Theatre is full of superlatives....

Magic Time!: ‘The Emperor of Atlantis’ at The In Series

The Emperor of Atlantis—an operatic takedown of autocracy—is relevant to our times in freaky and haunting ways. And its backstory is chilling. Near the end of World War II, the Czech composer Victor...

Review: ‘Switch’ at The Welders

The gender-flip trope has been a staple on stage for much of theater history, and just when you thought it had been trotted out every which way imaginable, along comes a delightful surprise. Brett...

Review: ‘The Vagrant Trilogy’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The vagrant of the title is a Palestinian scholar named Adham who, while on a trip to London as a grad student, must decide, when war breaks out in his homeland, whether to stay or go. Will he remain...

Review: ‘An Iliad’ at Atlas Performing Arts Center

The setting (designed by Daniel Prosky) is not a battlefield in Anatolia in modern day Turkey, but what appears to be the office of an academic – perhaps a classicist. There is no computer on the...

Review: ‘Lea Michele & Darren Criss – the LM/DC Tour’ at the Kennedy Center

Cue the dramatic backdrops because the lights of Broadway were sparkling this past Sunday at the Kennedy Center in DC. Crackling with infectious energy, the newly launched LM/DC Tour with Lea Michele...

Review: ‘Botticelli in the Fire’ at Woolly Mammoth

Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” is a painting famous for its youthful beauty and artistic mastery. When I stood in front of it in Florence, I struggled to look away –...

Review: ‘Flip Flop: A Miscast Cabaret’ at Monumental Theatre Company

For the fourth year in a row, Monumental Theatre Company has hosted their annual event, featuring top millennial talent from the DC area. Flip Flop: A Miscast Cabaret is the latest presentation of the...

Review: ‘Don Quixote’ by Ballet Nacional de Cuba at the Kennedy Center

With apologies to T.S. Elliot, Ballet Nacional de Cuba ends the Kennedy Center Ballet 2017-2018 season not with a whimper but a bang. A big bang! An explosive Don Quixote opened last night and repeats...

Review: ‘Camelot’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

Last month marked the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. As threats to his life mounted, King seemed resigned to his fate. “I’m not concerned about...

Magic Time!: ‘The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs’ at Spooky Action Theatre

The mystery at the center of this adroit drama keeps getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser: What’s in the small room at the top of the stairs? Playwright Carole Fréchette has crafted a cagey...

Review: ‘New Releases Choreographers Showcase’ at Dance Place

Back in the ’60s, Bob Dylan wrote “The Times They Are a-Changing,” an ode to protest, social change and the country’s mood moment. Dance Place’s New Releases Choreographers Showcase vamped Dylan’s...

Magic Time!: ‘Republic Undone’ at The Metropolitan Club

Going back to Ancient Greece, theater has functioned as a forum for informed public debate—about war, religion, politics, all the issues relevant to the citizenry of the day. The Greeks had a word for...

National Memorial Day Concert: Live Tonight From the US Capitol Building

I have reviewed the National Memorial Day Concerts several years in a row and they are always top notch events with distinguished talent. This year, the 29th-anniversary show, is no exception. The...

Magic Time!: ’10 Million’ and ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’ at The Kennedy Center

Among the rich offerings in The Kennedy Center’s Artes de Cuba festival were two extraordinary works of theater, each performed but twice: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Teatro El Público,...

Review: ‘The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs’ at Spooky Action

Looking for something well-crafted, suspenseful, and with plenty of lingering moments of anxiety? Then head on to Spooky Action Theater’s production of The Small Room at the Top of the Stairs. Written...

Review: ‘The Remains’ at Studio Theatre

They have such a tasteful, immaculate, picture-perfect kitchen, how could their marriage be such a sorry mess? That’s a crass way to ask the question, but the answers are beautifully nuanced in Ken...