Washington DC

Lessons in creative coping during COVID-19: A conversation with Rick Davis, dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason University

With college and university campuses in the DMV area closed because of COVID-19, distance learning is now the norm. But how do students in the performing and visual arts continue their education and...

Artists Who Inspire! #4: John Becker

Welcome to the fourth installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Design Elements in Professional Productions

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March, the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

Artists Who Inspire! #3: Jordan Friend

Welcome to the third installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

Full schedule of Quarantine Fest live play readings

Quarantine Fest—an all-day marathon of live readings of flash-created 10-minute plays—livestreams Sunday, April 19, 2020, with 26 new plays from Adventure Theatre MTC and another 26 new plays from...

UrbanArias’ new chamber opera ‘Glory Denied’ now streaming for free

The critically acclaimed production of Glory Denied from UrbanArias will stream until April 16, 2020. The streaming is viewable for free here on Vimeo and on the Urban Arias website. Glory Denied is a...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Performances in a Professional Production

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

Olney Theatre Center announces ambitious 2020–2021 season

During a recent live-streamed event, Olney Theatre Center Artistic Director Jason Loewith unveiled a lineup of 17 plays, concerts, and presentations coming in 2020–2021 as part of the company’s 83rd...

The Kennedy Center and NSO reach new agreement in the face of COVID-19

After several days of collaborative discussions, Kennedy Center leadership and the musicians of the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) have reached a new agreement, a significant step in stabilizing...

Molly Smith: “Our job as artists is to remind our fellow human beings that better days are coming”

“In the dark times Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” —Bertolt Brecht (motto to Svendborg Poems) When I saw the blooming cherry blossoms this year, I...

DCMTA Spring 2020 Staff Favorites: Outstanding Professional Theater Productions

Normally we who cover theater for DC Theater Arts collect our favorites as the year draws to a close, but this has not been a normal year. In mid-March, the 2020 season was interrupted by a pandemic...

20th annual WATCH Award winners

Announcement of Awards: 20th Annual Washington Area Theatre Community Honors (THE WATCH AWARDS) The 2019 WATCH Award winners were announced on April 4th, 2020. The ceremony was canceled due to the...

Contemporary American Theater Festival rescheduled to July 2021

For the past thirty years, the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has produced and developed new plays in rotating repertory. DC Theater...

Signature Theatre’s ‘Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes’ now available for streaming

Beginning Monday, March 30, 2020, Signature Theatre patrons will have the ability to watch the world premiere production of Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes by DC playwright Dani Stoller from their...

Arena Stage temporarily furloughs a majority of its staff

Arena Stage announced on Saturday, March 28th that it will temporarily furlough the majority of its staff starting on April 13th. 88 employees will be furloughed at that time. Furloughed employees...

Olney Theatre Center makes ‘The Amateurs’ available online for one week, offers other online content

Olney Theatre Center’s production of The Amateurs by Jordan Harrison and directed by Jason King Jones will be available to stream online beginning Saturday, March 28 at noon through the end of Sunday,...

Financial help for theaters and individuals to offset COVID-19 losses

During these difficult, uncertain times of the COVID-19 pandemic, we at DCMTA want to inform the theater community about financial relief that becomes available to nonprofits and individuals in the...

4615 Theatre Company launches first livestream performance tonight

Surprise! 4615 Theatre Company is thrilled to announce its first piece of #quarantinetheatre: a live online reading of This Vessel Is A Fragile Thing, by DC-based playwright Britt A Willis. An...

Artists Who Inspire! #2: Deb Sivigny

Welcome to the second installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

Artists Who Inspire #1: Tia Shearer Bassett

Welcome to the first installment of Artists Who Inspire! During this unprecedented shutdown of live theater, DCMTA will use this space to lift up local theater artists who are finding ways to remain...

Contemporary American Theater Festival hosts season announcement online

Shepherdstown, WV: For the past decade, the Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University has hosted a Shepherdstown Sneak Peek. Originally scheduled to be held at the Marinoff Theater...

Solas Nua celebrates 15th anniversary season with ‘Cyber Craic’

Washington might be stuck at home this St. Patrick’s Day but that’s not stopping Solas Nua from celebrating the best of Irish culture. Over the next two weeks, the DC Irish arts group will be posting...

Kennedy Center Education Artist-in-Residence Mo Willems to host ‘Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems’

(WASHINGTON)— The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ first-ever Education Artist-in-Residence, Emmy Award®–winning writer and New York Times best-selling author and illustrator Mo...

1st Stage announces thirteenth season

1st Stage Tysons has announced its thirteenth season, opening in September 2020. September 10 – October 11, 2020 Mlima’s Tale by Lynn Nottage directed by José Carrasquillo Pulitzer Prize Winner and...

Arena Stage’s ‘Celia and Fidel’ explores the influences on Cuba’s revolutionary leader

Part of Arena Stage’s ongoing Power Plays, the world premiere of Celia and Fidel transports the audience back to a time when Fidel Castro was not just a name in the history books, but a feared...

4615 Theatre’s world premiere ‘Museum 2040’: An extraordinary immersive installation

Museum 2040, a world premiere written by Playwright Renee Calarco and directed by Artistic Director Jordan Friend, is an extraordinary immersive installation, which confirms 4615 Theater Company’s...

Olney Theatre Center’s ‘The Amateurs’ is a comedy of ‘epidemic’ proportions

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned plague to get you pondering life’s big questions: the Bubonic Plague, the AIDS Crisis, COVID-19, really any epidemic will do. Of course, Jordan Harrison’s...

A harrowing ‘Pass Over’ powerfully performed at Studio Theatre

There is a drama on stage right now at Studio Theatre—Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu—so harrowing it will stop your heart. In it, Christopher Lovell and Jalen Gilbert give two of the most powerful...

‘Riffs and Relations’: WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists Program sounds so very American

You’d have to be dead not to enjoy a recital of the caliber given this past Sunday in the Phillips Collection Music Room by members of the current class of Washington National Opera’s Cafritz Young...

Ancient mysteries astonish and delight at IN Series’ Women Composers Festival

‘Here Be Sirens’ is the phrase cartographers used for many centuries to warn sailors of marine dangers. Composer Kate Soper borrowed the name for her musically complex, theatrically rich opera, her...

Hexagon’s ‘One State Two State Red State Blue State’: A chuckle for a good cause

News got you nervous? Quaking over coronavirus? Morose about the stock market? Fed up with the Fed? Sick of the swamp? And yet, do you fear if you take your mind off it all for a second, things might...

Another lost female genius found, in ‘Einstein’s Wife’ at ExPats Theatre

The history of science is studded with female geniuses snubbed by sexism. There’s biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, geneticist Nettie Stevens, chemist Alice Ball— And several such brilliant women’s...

Monumental Theatre Company’s ‘Head Over Heels’ is a toe-tapping celebration of life, love, and self

After receiving a foreboding prophecy of loss and destruction, the King of Arcadia is determined to outwit the gods and save his kingdom’s “beat.” To do so, he takes his queen, two daughters, and...

Small-town redemption still resonates in Rockville Little Theatre’s ‘The Spitfire Grill’

The Spitfire Grill was in Off-Broadway previews on 9/11. In part because its heartwarming, American roots/small-town spirited songs and characters struck a powerful emotional chord in the days that...

IN Series’ ‘Dorothy Fields Cabaret’ honors first woman inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame

In my 20s, I lamented that despite being well-schooled in American literature, I’d ended up a failure at knowing much of our nation’s poetry by heart. But when I set out to entertain myself and a...

Behind the lines: A pre-opening peek at 4615 Theatre’s ‘Museum 2040’

When Jordan Friend, the highly inventive founder of 4615 Theatre Company, invited me to attend a rehearsal of Museum 2040 a few weeks ago, I jumped at the opportunity. The show, billed as an...

Plenty to chew on in ExPats’ thoughtful production of ‘Einstein’s Wife’

Ready for a dandy production about the complicated life with a child-like diva who happens to be a genius? Then consider Einstein’s Wife from ExPats Theatre. Written by Serbian playwright Snezana...

Fearless feminist dance takes the stage in Martha Graham Dance Company’s ‘The EVE Project’

On the eve of the day we learned that we still can’t elect a woman as qualified as Elizabeth Warren president, the Martha Graham Dance Company returned to the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater with...

Piano duo from Portugal work outward from their country’s folk melodies in Embassy Series visit to Washington

Taking music from a performer’s own culture and pulling it together with more familiar-sounding music into a coherent program for an American audience is often tricky business. If it comes across as...

‘Bandstand’ at the National Theatre is a musical love letter to veterans and their families

Bandstand, a heart-wrenching musical about a group of veterans returning home from World War II, with music by Richard Oberacker, and book and lyrics by Rob Taylor and Oberacker, is at The National...

“I want to make space for women who make mistakes”: A Q&A with Dani Stoller, author of ‘Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes’ at Signature Theatre

Dani Stoller’s world-premiere comedy Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes is funny and witty and in its own quirky way quite deep. Plus it puts the screw in screwball. Discovered in the SigWorks...

WNO’s ‘Don Giovanni’ signals the cultural and healing power of Washington’s arts scene

The Washington National Opera’s current production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni confirms two important ideas. The first is that while opera is most effective when it entertains, its intrinsic value is...

New theater company in Takoma Park announces inaugural season and open auditions

There’s a new theater in town. Encore Theater Company, a new nonprofit theater based in the Takoma Park community, has announced its inaugural season. The 2020/21 season will feature two intimate,...

Avant Bard’s finely-tuned ‘Suddenly Last Summer’ keeps the audience on its toes

Let us never forget that Tennessee Williams, for all his genius with poetic language, was one of the most fearless, gut-wrenchingly honest playwrights of the twentieth century. We have Blanche DuBois...

J’Nai Bridges’ debut in ‘Samson and Delilah’ is a dream come true

When J’Nai Bridges made her triumphant debut in Camille Saint-Saëns’ Samson and Delilah Sunday night, it was the fulfillment of a dream. The young mezzo-soprano’s star has been rapidly rising — this...

Broadway phenom Norm Lewis delivers at the Kennedy Center

Norm Lewis is an icon. This is an indisputable fact. There are few others who have made such an impact on the way we view certain roles. His impressive bio includes such credits as the first African...

Washington National Opera stages a vocally stirring, visually arresting ‘Samson and Delilah’ at The Kennedy Center

Tales of wars, slaughters, betrayals, competing tribes and religions, and a few dominant women make the Book of Judges one of the more colorful segments of the Hebrew Bible. Camille Saint-Saëns and...

Washington Performing Arts and Alfred Street Baptist Church present reverent evening of musical performance with ‘I Am a Man’ at The Kennedy Center

A reverently curated evening by the Artistic Director of Washington Performing Arts’ Men and Women of the Gospel Choir, Theodore Thorpe III, I am a Man: Reclaiming Brilliance in the Midst of...

‘Boys Don’t Cry’ at Dance Place rejoices in macho detox

Boys Don’t Cry made this boy cry. It happened near the end. I had been watching a performance by the French dance company Cie Hervé KOUBI. Seven shirtless male dancers, all from different countries,...

Historical drama and physical comedy combine in an enjoyable ‘Moonlight and Magnolias’ at Laurel Mill Playhouse

It’s 1939 and film studio chief David O. Selznick has staked his career on adapting Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel Gone with the Wind for the screen. Still, Selznick shuts down production after...