Kennedy Center

Review: ‘The King and I’ at The Kennedy Center

Swapping one beloved Rodgers and Hammerstein’s national tour production for another, the Tony Award-winning Lincoln Center Theater revival of The King and I made its Washington, D.C. premiere at The...

Review: ‘Cabaret’ at The Kennedy Center

Cabaret, the blistering musical satire written more than 50 years ago by John Kander and Fred Ebb, stormed into The Kennedy Center this week with a performance that had the audience on its feet, and...

In the Moment: Report on ‘Declassified’ at The Kennedy Center

A hearty bro-hug to The Kennedy Center and to the National Symphony Orchestra’s (NSO) new Artistic Advisor, Ben Folds, for having the joint jumping at the recent late night Declassified event. It was...

Capital Fringe Preview: ‘Lazarus’ by Evan Crump

“I sell life, secondhand”: Unstrung Harpist Productions’ Lazarus at the 2017 Capital Fringe Festival What does immortality mean to you? Is it the hope that modern medicine will discover cures for the...

Review: The Second City’s ‘Divided We Stand’ at The Kennedy Center

They’re back! Second City–the group that made Chicago the capital of comedy and that all but invented improv–has returned to DC, where it is part of The Kennedy Center’s month-long second annual...

Review: ‘The Sound of Music’ at The Kennedy Center

Art has a way to awaken the senses and make you feel alive. Art shakes the dreariness of everyday life off you as you bathe in the beauty of a live musical performance. The Sound of Music at The...

Review: ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ at The Kennedy Center

It’s hard to believe that almost 20 years have passed since John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask’s ground-breaking, genre-bending, glam-rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch first emerged, but the...

Review: New York City Ballet: 2 Programs of Works by Balanchine, Peck, Ratmansky, and Wheeldon

Urgency propels them forward. In a blink there are flashes of precise articulation and rapid fluidity as sweeping curves carry a leg overhead or propel a body high in the air. Dancers merge from...

Preview: Columbia Festival of the Arts Come Home to the Lakefront, Celebrating Columbia’s 50th Anniversary

Under new Director David Phillips, the Columbia Festival of the Arts will be back at the Lakefront in Town Center Columbia this year. Phillips, who has a background as Associate Dean for the Visual,...

Review: ‘New York City Ballet: Works by Balanchine, Peck, and Ratmansky’ at The Kennedy Center

Last evening’s ballet concert at The Kennedy Center was one of those magical evenings of dance. Sipping champagne and not talking politics, balletomanes gathered on the sprawling deck that surrounds...

Report: ‘A Centennial Celebration of John F. Kennedy’ at The Kennedy Center

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (The Kennedy Center) paid elegant tribute to the legacy of its namesake in A JFK Centennial Celebration on May 29, 2017, the 100th birthday of our...

Review: ‘(In)Security: Or, Jack and Nikki Do the Cold War Tango’ at The Kennedy Center

Memorial Day this year coincided to the day with the 100th anniversary of the birth of President John F. Kennedy. To commemorate the occasion, The Kennedy Center put on a full weekend of events,...

In The Moment: A Report on ‘ReBirth of a Nation’ at The Kennedy Center

It was an evening like few others in the company of of hundreds at The Kennedy Center on a recent evening. What took place was a performance meant to strike a hot chord for cultural and political...

Review: ‘Voices in the Rubble’ and ‘Endgame’ at Rapid Lemon Productions

Max Garner’s Rapid Lemon Productions (“Rapid Lemon”) is pairing two short Absurdist Theater gems to create an evening of darkly-humorous nihilism at the Motor House performance space. And, like me, it...

Review: Mason Bates’ KC Jukebox: ‘Thievery Corporation’ at The Kennedy Center

The ethereal and complex mixture of sounds that Thievery Corporation has produced over a 22-year career has given them lots of material and a dedicated following. Their show last night at The Kennedy...

Report: The 2017 ‘Kennedy Center Arts Summit’

Two-hundred and fifty artist citizens, teachers, members of arts non-profits, business executives, scientists and technologists from around the world, came together for a full day at the fourth annual...

Review: ‘Come Together:  A Celebration of John Lennon’ at The Kennedy Center

At a time when we can only imagine a world without walls of division and exclusion, the Annual Kennedy Center’s Spring Gala concert, Come Together: A Celebration of John Lennon, reached for the stars...

Review: ‘Madame Butterfly’ at The Kennedy Center

Gorgeous, ravishing arias by the legendary Puccini, an ethereally beautiful performance by Soprano Ermonela Jaho as Cio-Cio San (Butterfly), and an exceptionally ingenious concept and stage design by...

Review: The 22nd Annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival: Abbey Lincoln Tribute at The Kennedy Center

The music of Abbey Lincoln was The Kennedy Center’s choice for its 22nd Annual Mary Lou Williams Jazz Festival. Showcasing the best in old and new jazz artistry, this year’s tribute presented Jazz...

Review: ‘Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs’ at The Kennedy Center

Wearing his heart on his sleeve throughout, entertainer extraordinaire Alan Cumming (Tony-award winner for Cabaret, regular on the hit television series The Good Wife, concert and recording star,...

Review: NSO Pops: LeAnn Rimes at The Kennedy Center

International multi-platinum selling acclaimed singer and ASCAP award-winning songwriter LeAnn Rimes returned to DC Friday night, joining the National Symphony Orchestra (NSO) at The Kennedy Center...

Review: ‘Three Sisters’ at Maly Drama Theatre at The Kennedy Center

Anton Chekhov’s classic play Three Sisters is being given a superb rendering by the Maly Drama Theatre (from St Petersburg, Russia) at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater. Director Lev Dodin...

Spine: ‘Three Sisters’ by the Maly Drama Theatre at The Kennedy Center

With the Maly Drama Theatre’s Three Sisters, playing through April 30 at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theatre, theatre lovers will feast on every slow motion wonderment, every long glance into...

The Kennedy Center Announces Its 2017-2018 Theater Season: ‘Hamilton,’ ‘The Humans,’ ‘The Color Purple,’ ‘In the Heights,’ ‘An American in Paris,’ ‘On Your Feet,’ ‘The Book of Mormon,’ and More

From The Kennedy Center: 2017–2018 Theater Season: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts today announced programming for its 2017–2018 theater season in an event on the famed Opera House...

Review: ‘Ballet Across America’ at The Kennedy Center Opera House

What does 21st-century ballet look like? For The Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America program, principle dancer and celeb ballerina Misty Copeland, 34, and 29-year-old New York City Ballet dancer...

Review: Ballet Across America Showcases a New Day in Dance at The Kennedy Center

Since its debut in 2008, The Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America series continues to showcase the best of ballet from regional companies across the nation. This fourth time around, there are the...

Who’s in Town?: Alan Cumming Discusses His Upcoming Cabaret Show ‘Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs’ at The Kennedy Center on April 29th

If you are like me, you would have given your right arm for an invitation to “Club Cumming,” the nightly party Alan Cumming held in his dressing room at Studio 54 after performances of Cabaret, the...

Review: Geoffrey Keezer Trio with Special Guest Gillian Margot at the KC Jazz Club

As soon as the Trio finished Thelonius Monk’s “Brilliant Corners, the KC Jazz Club exploded in applause. Some music is not listened to: it is experienced, your body vibrating like a window to the...

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: ‘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...

In the Moment: A Talk with the Pipeline Playwrights: Part Two: Patricia Connelly and Jean Koppen

This is the second installment of In the Moment columns focusing on the Pipeline Playwrights. Pipeline Playwrights is a small collective of accomplished Northern Virginia women playwrights. Pipeline’s...

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: ‘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...

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: 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: ‘Grug & the Rainbow’ at The Kennedy Center’s Family Theater

A colorful story wowed the kids and their parents at today’s 1:30 PM performance of the Windmill Theatre Company of Australia’s Grug & the Rainbow, directed by Sam Haren, which ends its brief visit...

Review: ‘Not My Baby’ at Momentum Collective

What defines parenthood? Are children always a gift? The adoption-themed Hip Hop musical Not My Baby by Alexandria, Virginia-based playwright Jason A. Ellis, explores those questions and more. With...

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....

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...

Meet the Cast of The Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC’s ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ Part Two: Shawn Morris

In Part Two of a series of interviews with the cast of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, meet Shawn Morris. Please introduce yourself and tell our...

Review: ‘Champion’ at Washington National Opera

In the fascinating contemporary opera Champion, the external world of the often-violent sport of boxing and the inner turmoil of the self-loathing and self-denial of the lead character collide to...

Review: ‘Dead Man Walking’ at Washington National Opera

It is certainly a “Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross) for Sister Helen Prejean in the contemporary opera Dead Man Walking. A meditative, spiritually resonant study of our common humanity...

Review: NSO Pops: An Evening with Ledisi at The Kennedy Center

“Peaches” was in the house. Inspired by the spirit of Nina Simone, acclaimed American R&B and jazz recording artist, songwriter and actress, Ledisi performed an eclectic program of blues, jazz and R&B...

In the Moment: A Talk with the Pipeline Playwrights: Part One: Ann Timmons and Soo-Jin Lee

Northern Virginia is very much alive and supporting original play development by local playwrights. The diversity of the Northern Virginia demographic provides for fresh experiences to base a play on....

Review: Regina Carter: ‘Simply Ella’ at The Kennedy Center

Regina Carter and her violin: a human voice has never sounded so true. If you get a chance to experience Regina Carter: Simply Ella, the jazz quintet composed of Regina Carter (violin), Marvin Sewell...

Review: Jazzmeia Horn at the Kennedy Center Jazz Club

To understand the voice of Jazzmeia Horn — whether it’s embodying her own ballad, the cleverly romantic, soft “Legs and Arms,” or taking on the role of an instrumentalist — is to understand what it...

Review #2: Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at The Kennedy Center

The beloved Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is back at The Kennedy Center for a week-long run. Now 57 years old, the company pulls from a repertoire dating back to 1960. Using a combination of...