Washington DC

2019 Capital Fringe Applications Now Open!

Applications are now open for the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival! See below for application details. OPTION 1: FRINGE RUN VENUE Participation in the Fringe Festival is an opportunity for you to develop...

Review: ‘Hairspray’ by Reston Community Players

Reston Community Players has built a reputation of presenting professional-quality theater that surpasses expectations of volunteer-based community theater, and their most recent production is no...

Review: ‘Blithe Spirit’ at Other Voices Theatre

This Halloween season, Other Voices Theatre is conjuring up a delightful evening of comedy in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, brilliantly directed by Susan Thornton. Wishing to observe the behavior of...

Review: ‘Blight’ by Pinky Swear Productions at Anacostia Playhouse

A few years ago, the teenage son of a single mom shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic, and now the nice suburban home they lived in is a blight. The house not only brings the neighborhood down; it...

Review: ‘Figaro in Four Quartets’ by the In Series

From behind tall blank panels, a cast of characters drawn from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro emerge, dressed in all white period garb, staging vignettes of frustrated and consummated love punctuated...

Magic Time!: ‘Chocolate Covered Ants’ by Restoration Stage at THEARC

When three hours in the theater elapse faster than many a 90-minute performance, it’s a good bet you’ve been in the thrall of a master storyteller. And that’s what happens in Chocolate Covered Ants,...

Review: ‘9 to 5: The Musical’ at Prince William Little Theatre

It can be hard sometimes for a musical adapted from a well-loved movie to meet expectations. Prince William Little Theater’s production of 9 to 5: The Musical was a fantastic and energy-filled...

Review: ‘Masters of the Italian Baroque’ by the National Chamber Ensemble

For those of us who are fans of the Baroque period, it’s no secret that the Counter Reformation served as one of the most fertile periods in European art history. With the advent of opera and the...

Review: ‘The Changeling’ by Brave Spirits Theatre

Sex, sin, retribution, and vengeance are only starting points for the simmering cauldron that is Brave Spirit’s amped production of The Changeling, a four centuries old Jacobean drama by Thomas...

Review: ‘Émilie, La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight’ by Vienna Theatre Company

Editing from the playwright’s own words, “Émilie is a play about legacy,” and “is a dilated moment in time just before Emilie’s death. It is a game of wit, a defiance of mortality, a beautiful battle...

Review: ‘Frankenstein’ by We Happy Few

A giant, wheezing monster, many feet tall and wide, a formless head towering over the audience, bathed in green light, with a voice made of dust and despair. That’s just one of the many fabulous...

Magic Time!: Actor Michael Kevin Darnall Opens Up About Being Open on Stage

When Michael Kevin Darnall plays a character who is the focus of a long scene and we can watch every nuance and shading of his emotional expression without interruption, he can be transfixing. When I...

Review: ‘Let the Right One In’ at Maryland Ensemble Theatre

Sweet innocence with a mature danger underneath – that is Let the Right One In at Maryland Ensemble Theatre (MET) in a phrase. If you are a fan of the horror and vampire genres, you have likely heard...

Choreographer Cathy Marston Talks Kennedy Center Debut With San Francisco Ballet

In San Francisco, the Unbound Festival included twelve choreographers and was a massive undertaking filled with phenomenal risks, tremendous creative freedom and the excitement of new territory. For...

Interview: San Francisco Ballet Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson Brings ‘Unbound’ to The Kennedy Center

In San Francisco, the Unbound Festival included 12 choreographers and was a massive undertaking filled with phenomenal risks, tremendous creative freedom and the excitement of new territory. For their...

Review: ‘Chocolate Covered Ants’ by Restoration Stage at THEARC

Hurt people hurt people: a cliché, yes, but one that helps understand many of the characters in Steven A. Butler, Jr.’s Chocolate Covered Ants, revived in Restoration Stage’s gorgeous new home in...

Halloween Best Bets for DC Theatre Lovers

Looking to have a spoooooky good

Senator Chris Van Hollen Cuts Ribbon to Re-open Adventure Theatre MTC After Devastating Fire

Adventure Theatre MTC announced its grand reopening on October 15th in Glen Echo Park after 7 months of renovations due to an electrical fire. Senator Chris Van Hollen joined executives from Adventure...

In the Moment: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ at Round House Theatre

The latest data from the Child Welfare League of America indicate that in Maryland in 2015, there were over 51,000 referrals for child abuse and neglect. Of those, nearly 21,000 reports were referred...

Review: ‘Steel Magnolias’ by L.A. Theatre Works at George Mason University Center for the Arts

Robert Harling’s Steel Magnolias is a heartbreaking story that exemplifies the female bond and illustrates the resilient strength that bolsters six women from a small southern town through times of...

Review: ‘Rooms: A Rock Romance’ at MetroStage

By Danny Romeo MetroStage is getting the band back together. Rooms: A Rock Romance celebrates the ten-year anniversary of its premiere this year, in the very theatre where the production had its...

Review: ‘Aida’ by Constellation Theatre Company at Source

Just before intermission in Constellation Theatre Company’s sparkling and stirring production of Aida, there comes a wonderful “Wakanda Forever” moment. The fearless Nubian princess Aida (a...

Review: ‘How I Learned to Drive’ at Round House Theatre

Twenty years ago, Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive shocked audiences with its holistic examination of pedophilia. It takes a village to molest a child, Vogel believes, not just a perpetrator and a...

Review: ‘The Fall’ at Studio Theatre

A passionate purity burns bright in The Fall. The incandescence of young people with hearts on fire contending against oppressive institutions burns bright in the 2015 South Africa portrayed in The...

Rick Foucheux Returns to Quotidian: Retired Acting Legend Presents Backstage Comedy at Fundraiser

When Rick Foucheux, the award-winning actor whose work has dazzled DC audiences for 35 years, decided to retire last year, it wasn’t because he was tired of the stage. He just wanted to focus on other...

Review: ‘TSVETAEVA’ by the Russian Chamber Art Society

The Russian Chamber Art Society (RCAS) has been bringing Russian chamber music of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to Washington audiences for more than a decade, so its decision to expand...

‘Perhaps He’s a Prodigy.’ How Walter ‘Bobby’ McCoy Went from High School to the Heights of DC Theater

Many students use their high school musical to dip their toes into the theater world. Walter “Bobby” McCoy, used it to launch himself into the deep end. When McCoy was a freshman, the new theater...

Review: ‘New Guidelines for Peaceful Times’ at Spooky Action Theater

It is mid-April, 1945. The war in Europe is nearly over. However, neither a proper armistice nor formal surrender has been signed by the Allies with the former Nazi regime. It is an unsettled time...

Review: ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ at The Arlington Players

By Gloria DuGan As one who had reservations about enjoying a musical about The Hunchback of Notre Dame, I was pleasantly surprised viewing the production at The Arlington Players. It had passion,...

Review: ‘Spider’s Web’ at the Laurel Mill Playhouse

Agatha Christie’s suspense story, Spider’s Web, opened this weekend at the Laurel Mill Playhouse located on Main Street in historic Laurel, Maryland. This show is produced by Maureen Rogers and...

Review: ‘Dracula’ at The Little Theatre of Alexandria

Local theatre gems exist everywhere and The Little Theatre of Alexandria is definitely one of the DC area’s theatrical treasures. An exceptional cast brought Halloween to Old Town Alexandria with its...

Review: ‘A Shayna Maidel’ by Peace Mountain Theatre Company

By Julie Janson Peace Mountain Theatre Company’s production of Barbara Lebow’s A Shayna Maidel is a piercing, unabashed look at life before and after the Holocaust through the eyes of two separated...

Review: ‘Sleepy Hollow’ at Synetic Theater

It is officially Fall and nothing says Halloween season like Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Synetic Theater has taken this American horror classic and adapted the story into their own...

In the Moment: ‘Sleepy Hollow’ at Synetic Theater

As if inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or even Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Synetic’s highly original production of Sleepy Hollow, performed without dialogue, is an adult...

Review: ‘Les Misérables’ at the Hippodrome Theatre

The Hippodrome Theatre has bookended its 2018 season with a pair of heavy-lifting musicals about democracy and revolution. For openers, it has that 30th-anniversary touring production of Les...

Season 3 of ‘Shakespeare Uncovered’ Launches October 12 on WETA-26

Washington, DC has had a long love affair with Shakespeare. In our midst are institutions like the world-renowned Folger Shakespeare Library, and many DC-area theater companies that celebrate The...

William L. Hopkins And The Estate Of Richard B. Anderson Announce The 2018 Anderson-Hopkins Award For Excellence In Theatre

Washington, DC: The Anderson-Hopkins Award for Excellence in the Theater Arts presented six awards Monday night at Signature Theatre, October 8. The award was presented to actors Will Gartshore, Ted...

Review: ‘Venus in Fur’ at Compass Rose Theater

It is hard to describe Compass Rose Theater’s production of Venus in Fur except as awesome in the original sense of inspiring awe. Written by David Ives and first appearing off-Broadway in 2010, then...

Review: ‘La traviata’ by the Washington National Opera

Washington National Opera’s current production of Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata is a moving and heart-wrenching view of tragic romantic love in all its variations. Under the taut and astute direction...

Review: ‘Nevermore’ at Creative Cauldron

Creative Cauldron’s production of the musical Nevermore places the work of 19th-century writer, poet and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe at your feet. With music by Matt Connor, and Book by Grace...

Interview: Composer and Lyricist Michael Dansicker on ‘The Comedy of Errors’

With the addition of original music from composer/lyricist Michael Dansicker, Shakespeare Theatre Company’s (STC) The Comedy of Errors is abandonment into farce. Whatever may be outside the walls of...

Review: The Coil Project’s ‘Strange Tales: Paradise Motel’ at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop

Seasonally-themed evenings of short plays are a staple for smaller theater companies – and with Halloween just weeks away, The Coil Project offers up a quartet of violent and supernatural one-acts in...

Review: ‘Street Scene’ by Virginia Opera

Kurt Weill’s varied score, Langston Hughes’ eloquent lyrics, a powerful book by playwright Elmer Rice, and a quality ensemble cast combine in Virginia Opera’s production of Street Scene, to create the...

Review: ‘Ghostchasers’ by Encore Stage

By Andy Arnold You know you’ll have a bad day at work when the guests at the Hangtown Asylum for Extremely Tense People lock up the staff and take over the business. As it happens, the asylum is built...

Review: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center

It’s the heartwarming story of a hapless boy and his exotic plant. No, wait, it’s a cautionary sci-fi allegory about human desire. Correction: it’s a fun doo-wop musical packed with archetypical...

Review: ‘The Philadelphia Story’ at St. Mark’s Players

Philadelphia 1939. The Great Depression is nearly over and the United States is on the brink of war. Sent out by a gossip weekly to cover the wedding of socialite Tracy Lord (Lauren Devoll), reporter...

Review: ‘2018 Marian Anderson Vocal Award Winner: Ryan Speedo Green in Concert’ at the Kennedy Center

Ryan Speedo Green is a man with a story. Many opera fans first learned his name through Daniel Bergner’s 2016 book Sing for Your Life: A Story of Race, Music, and Family. The New York Times journalist...

In the Moment: ‘Heisenberg’ at Signature Theatre

With notes at the top of his work Heisenberg, playwright Simon Stephens gives undecorated, clear direction to theater companies for his expectations when producing the play: The present day. The stage...

Review: ‘The Comedy of Errors’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company

The Comedy of Errors is one of Shakespeare’s earliest and most popular works, so there is little point recounting the plot. One must only remember that it is the one with two sets of twins: one a pair...

Review: ‘The Comedy of Errors’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s production of The Comedy of Errors, directed by Sally Boyett, is a hilariously funny and inventive reimagining of Shakespeare’s early play, combining physical comedy,...