Washington DC

Review: ‘Seussical’ by McLean Community Players at Alden Theatre

Based on the fantastical imaginings of Dr. Seuss, Seussical is a light-hearted musical packed with color, magic, and mischief. McLean Community Players is running their production of this...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Home, Sweet, _____’

Home, Sweet, _____ takes audiences on a sentimental journey through music, sight gags, and pantomime. Without words, Home, Sweet, _____ tells the story of a clown, the frenetic Collette Campbell,...

50th Annual Ruby Griffith Award Goes to 2nd Star Productions

By Frankie Lewis The British Players’ ceremony for the 50th Anniversary of The Ruby Griffith Awards for Excellence in Community Theatre was held at the Bretton Woods Recreation Center in Germantown,...

Signature Theatre Announces ‘Assassins’ Cast and Creative Team

Signature Theatre has announced the full cast and creative team for Assassins with music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by John Weidman and directed by Signature Theatre Artistic Director Eric...

Review: ‘Southern Hospitality’ at Aldersgate Church Community Theater

Aldersgate Church Community Theater presents Southern Hospitality, written by Jessie Jones, Nicholas Hope, and Jamie Wooten. Eddie Page directs this outlandish comedy about a band of people who are...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Acuña Acuna’

Whenever Erick Acuña is asked to play Peruvian music, he launches into a burst of rock. Why not, he wonders, since rock is his country’s favorite sound. But rock is not what his hosts expect. No...

Riverside Center for the Performing Arts Announces Cast and Creative Team for South Pacific

Riverside Center for the Performing Arts is excited to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize-winning South Pacific with its new production in Fredericksburg, VA. The Rodgers and...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Little White Lies’

Four performers appear from unexpected places. Emerging from hallways, stairways and around corners with a rippling and tribal urgency, the movement of the dancers is steered by Y-shaped divining...

Review: ‘LadyM’ by The Welders

When the audience enters the performance space at Joe’s Movement Emporium, they are confronted by three women in period clothing (costumes designed by Julie Cray Leong, assisted by Kyla Carney). The...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘All for the Union’

15 actors. 20 scenes. The Civil War. A lot is at stake in All for the Union, written by the prize-winning playwright, librettist, and historian Meredith Bean McMath and directed by Jenna Powell, and...

Review: ‘The Explorers Club’ at Prologue Theatre

New companies, and especially hybrid troupes whose members have a variety of artistic origins and talents, are a vital part of DC’s theatrical ecosystem. The past few years have seen the launch of...

Review: ‘The Things They Carried’ at the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage

The Things They Carried is a personal people’s history. A sharply conjured chronicle. It is told at the most granular of levels by a platoon of characters. Performed solo by David Sitler, the...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Arcade’

Arcade is unlike anything you will experience at Fringe. Equal parts art installation, gaming experience, and nostalgia, Arcade perfectly encapsulates the feeling of walking into a 1980s arcade. The...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Iphigenia in Splott’

Set in a blighted corner of Wales, Iphigenia in Splott is a breathtaking one-woman show, imported from the UK and written by Gary Owen, a Welsh playwright and winner of the Meyer-Whitworth Award for...

Review: ‘The Mollusc’ by Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center

If you’re in the mood for a drawing-room comedy exploring the social habits of the British upper class in the Edwardian era, Bethesda’s Quotidian Theatre Company should be on your list. Quotidian is...

Review: ‘The Winter’s Tale’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Summer and Shakespeare are two very different things that somehow seem to go perfectly together. Every summer, theater companies all over the country dust off their British accents and take The Bard...

Review: ‘Absolutely Dead’ at Bowie Community Theatre

Absolutely Dead, written by Michael Walker and directed at Bowie Community Theatre by Ken Kienas, is a charming and hilarious dark comedy centered around a murder mystery. I’m afraid to give away too...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Knights of Salisbury’

The Knighthood Players’ Production of The Knights of Salisbury, by Tim Caron, directed by Tim Caron and Ilyana Rose-Davila, with music direction by Jason Schoenfeld, is a nostalgic, though awkward and...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘American Diet’

Here’s a show description you don’t see often: “A dark yet whimsical exploration of food, fitness, body image, and metabolic endocrinology.” And I will say, that’s no lie. In American Diet’s 45 minute...

Review: ‘Be More Chill’ at Monumental Theatre Company

If you can’t get to the Broadway sensation Be More Chill, which closes August 11, there is no need to despair. Monumental Theatre Company is presenting the DMV’s first professional version of this...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘EyeSOAR’

EyeSOAR is primarily a dance performance which incorporates video, audio interviews, music, and the spoken word to tell the story of the Shirlington neighborhood in Arlington, Virginia. This...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Beyond These Walls’

Beyond These Walls is a provocative contribution to the Capital Fringe, and well worth seeing. It was originally devised in 2018 under the direction of Matt Bassett, Artistic Director of the Hub...

Review: ‘Joy Rebel’ at the Logan Festival of Solo Performance at 1st Stage

Joy Rebel, written and performed by Khanisha Foster, is a moving, deep dive into fluid identity and the fraught experiences of a mixed-race human being. Joy Rebel is a revealing autobiographical...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘This Place of Ours’

When done well, dance has a unique ability to tell a compelling narrative through themes that audience members can then adapt to their own perspectives and stories. Moving Body Dance Company has...

Review: ‘American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables’ by The Hub Theatre

Playwright Sam Hamashima is described in his program bio as working in the “collision between his queer identity and his Japanese-American identity.” In American Spies and Other Homegrown Fables,...

2019 Capital Fringe Review ‘What Wasn’t’

By Rebecca Kurtz Perhaps it is a matter of personal preference that at Fringe I am often more taken by the comedies than by the dramas. The intensely self-involved process of making and performing a...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Nothing Broken’

Nothing Broken is an autobiographical one-woman show written and performed by Amanda Haddock, directed by Cathy Reinking. It tells the story of Hope, who is grappling with the end of her ten year...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: The Little Senator That Could

The Little Senator That Could held its world premiere at Capital Fringe on July 12, 2019, and it is nearly perfect for Washington, DC. Billed as a comedy, playwright Kirsten Grady’s show is actually a...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Six Months of Winter’

By Helen Ganley Conjuring up images of day and night, one imagines the sun cascading into a pink and purple horizon while the moon excitedly and stoically takes its place in the sky. The picture, in...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Good & Kissed’

Ladies, grab your closest friends, make a post-show dinner reservation, and head to Capital Fringe’s Good & Kissed for a night out that will make you laugh, cry, and spur your own stories of loss and...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Flirting Like an American’

George Washington University researcher Sufian Zhemukhov is a popular guy around Washington. He has several awards for his storytelling and some of the stories he relies on in Flirting Like an...

Review: ‘Hand to God’ by Wolf Pack Theatre Company

Featuring everything from simulated puppet sex, tawdry seductions and a mangled ear, the Tony-nominated Hand to God, by Robert Askins, is a play that dares to be different. Director William Dean Leary...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘She Sings Light’

She Sings Light, written by Claudia Rosales-Waters and directed by Josh Sticklin, is one of four ‘curated’ shows in the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival. That means that this highly symbolic drama—which...

Review: ‘The Band’s Visit’ at The Kennedy Center

“All alone in the quiet /And my ears are thirsty / For your voice, for your voice / Can you answer me.” Those lyrics from The Band’s Visit’s “Answer Me” burrowed into my heart as I took in The Band’s...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Conversations’

One of the more common phenomena of fringe festivals like ours is to see young actors commit to intensely personal projects, creating a cohesive performance piece that celebrates and reflects on their...

Review: ‘The Juliet Letters’ by UrbanArias

UrbanArias delivers a physical, aural, and emotional journey in their brilliant interpretation of Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet’s The Juliet Letters. Based upon imagined love letters written...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Veneer of Beauty’

Last year, Shaun Michael Johnson put himself on the map as a master storyteller, whose protean moves captivated audiences at the Capital Fringe Festival with Sobriety of Fear, a compelling story about...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Hold the Tomato’

Back at the Fringe Festival after their successful 2018 appearance, Laugh Index Theatre’s production of Hold the Tomato strikes a number of funny bones during its fast-paced series of comic sketches....

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Passing’

Passover, the holiday that marks the Exodus, that signals to Jews and the world that this night is different from all others because we are not slaves, but free, is the moving backdrop to John...

Daily Dispatches from Mike Daisey’s ‘A People’s History’

[CLICK HERE to read all 18 dispatches in chronological order.] Chapter 18: The Living Moment, July 21 7pm This final chapter continued to retell and reinterpret a people’s history, meaning the...

Review: ‘The Ballad of Mu Lan’ at Imagination Stage

Imagination Stage’s The Ballad of Mu Lan is the funny and poignant tale of a Chinese woman warrior who defies tradition in order to protect her father and be the person she feels she was meant to be....

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘I Know It Was the Blood: The Totally True Adventures of a Newfangled Black Woman’

Written, directed, and acted by playwright Tara Lake, I Know It Was the Blood: The Totally True Adventures of a Newfangled Black Woman, is a one-woman trip down the poetic and artful memory lane of...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Oizys in the Waiting Room’

There is reason for concern or apprehension as you scroll the morning headlines or track developing news moment by moment. Closer to home, the cause for unease might be a decision as simple as...

Review: ‘Bright Colors and Bold Patterns’ at Studio Theatre

Gerry is mad. Furious even. And who can blame him? He’s all set for the wedding of the … well … summer. He’s driven out the I10 from Los Angeles to Palm Springs and the expensively tasteful invitation...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Our Town Plus Zombies’

By Rebecca Kurtz What fun! The Adequate Players make a splash again at Fringe this summer with writer/director/actor John Geoffrion’s one-act parody of Thorton Wilder’s 1938 ode to the small town....

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Heist’

Improv, as any actor knows, is harder than it looks. And dramatic improv—in which actors invent their roles as they go, expanding on a basic situation in ways that are both comic and sad—is even more...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Intimate Dinner’

Anyone who has been a server in a restaurant will likely sympathize with the plight of the well-intentioned and yet deterioratingly cheerful waitress, Lauren, in Intimate Dinner by Lauren French...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘A Short History of Unfortunate Animals’

Aficionados of modern dance and movement theatre take note: if you are hungry for something unique, abstract and poetic, get thee to the Plum space at Arena Stage for A Short History of Unfortunate...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘That’s Not How It Happened’

Funny, sweet, and poignant, Colleen Hindsley’s one-woman show, That’s Not How It Happened, will resonate with anyone who misses their parents, has endured the torture of older siblings, or nearly...

2019 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Velvet Determination’

When Cynthia Shaw sits down at the piano and casually busts out Bach’s Allegro from Italian Concerto, you know Velvet Determination isn’t your average Fringe show. Written and performed by Shaw and...