2018

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Shopworn’

Race relations in the Deep South might not leap to mind as a promising topic for a laugh-out-loud comedy. But in Shopworn, premiering at Fringe, Playwright-Producer Derek Hills (who is white) has...

The 2018 Ruby Griffith Awards

As we know from the recent Royal Wedding, the British know how to throw a party. The most recent example was the top-notch afternoon when the British Players hosted the leading lights of Washington...

2018 Capital Fringe Festival: Black Confederates

by Isabel Echavarria Black Confederates by James F. Bruns and directed by David Allen Schmidt depicts a conversation between Jefferson Davis, played by Larry Levinson, and his wife Varina Davis,...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: metamorphose

Jo Williamson is the creator and performer behind metamorphose, a solo production stitched together out of some musical storytelling and the patterns of Martha Graham-like modern dance. As its name...

2018 Capital Fringe Festival: (Super) Friends

There is a kernel of a great idea behind (Super) Friends, AnyStage Theater’s offering by Andrew Brockmeyer currently playing at Capital Fringe: Two superhero arch-nemeses, one ostensibly good and one...

Review: ‘Pippin’ by Monumental Theatre Company

Yes, there is magic done at Monumental Theatre’s nifty production of Pippin. I am not overstating my utter enjoyment of this production. It is spunky, buoyant, and engaging from the moment the first...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Love in Three Scenes’

Love in Three Scenes, which opened during the second week of this year’s Capital Fringe, is not so much about love per se as it is about the lack thereof, particularly on the part of our political...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Dangerous When Wet: Booze, Sex & My Mother’

Solo performances are among the most difficult in show business. Without other actors to parry dialog or set up jokes, the entertainer can easily end up putting an audience to sleep. Luckily for us,...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Horse People’

By Beatrice Loayza Watching Lindsey Griffith’s one-woman performance Horse People, I can’t help but feel as if I’ve stumbled into a dream. Papier-mâché horse heads, large overhead projections,...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Hawaii Nei’

By Becca Kurtz The pair of plays that make up Paul Handy’s “Hawaii Nei” fit together nicely in a 90-minute, fact-packed commentary on the state – both past and present – of the reluctant 50th state....

Review: ‘Anything Goes’ by Rockville Musical Theatre

Anything Goes is one of those old-timey musicals where even if you’ve never seen the show before, you somehow discover you know the words to every one of the songs. Filled with exciting dance numbers,...

Magic Time!: ‘O Monsters’ at Capital Fringe and the Limits of Criticism

I went to see O Monsters, the radically abstract production created by Philadelphia’s New Paradise Laboratories, now playing in the Kogod Cradle at Arena as one of five curated productions in 2018...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘This Historic Night’

By Christina Kovac On the simple and appropriately bleak set, Seed Productions presents its premiere of This Historic Night, five short plays wound into one terrific show, written by local DC...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘God is Dead and April is Getting Married’

God is Dead and April is Getting Married: A show title that promises a lot and absolutely delivers. Written by A. A. Brenner, this Capital Fringe jewel opens with El (Anna Shafer) and Elliot (Colton...

Review: ‘Brahman/I’ at The Logan Festival of Solo Performance

Set in a non-descript stand-up comedy club, the 1st Stage production of Brahman/I has a clever premise: a solo performer reveals some of a human being’s most intimate details. Brahman/I is a unique...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Vengeance in My Heart’

By Beatrice Loayza Titus Andronicus is the little-known Shakespeare tragedy most reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film. Bloody murder, sex, and violence galore, Andronicus is historically a work...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Roko’s Basilisk’

As the audience enters to see Roko’s Basilisk produced by Reliant Theatre, they are handed not a playbill, but a flyer, whose relevance is not immediately apparent. Its text simply states that “In the...

Review: ‘The House of Blue Leaves’ at Silver Spring Stage

First staged in 1971, The House of Blue Leaves is a descendant of the kitchen sink dramas and average joe tragedies that marked the American and British theater scenes in the turbulent decade...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Lives Left Behind’

In The Lives Left Behind, the Silver Finch Arts Collective presents four short, one-act, chamber operas, each by a different composer and librettist. The instrumental music for all four pieces is...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Aphrodite’s Refugees’

Monica Dionysiou gives audiences a bravura hour of solo storytelling in her Aphrodite’s Refugees, which is based on the experiences of her family during the warfare that consumed Cyprus in the...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Gilded’

By Bill Kamberger Conceived and choreographed by Kristen Brooks Sandler for Harlot Productions, Gilded depicts “a steampunk monarchy in decline,” including two illicit love affairs, Byzantine intrigue...

Review: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare, directed by Sally Boyett and Donald Hicken, is being performed on the grounds of St. John’s College in the...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Cold Rain’

We’ve all heard of the sage advice, “be careful what you wish for.” But it should be doubly heeded when there’s magic involved. In writer and director Craig Houk’s Cold Rain, a spell to summon love...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War’

2000FeetUp Theatre Company is a new Iranian-Canadian theatre helmed by director Siavash Shabanpour. The company is based in Toronto and has brought Romanian-French playwright Matei Visniec’s 1997 work...

Review: ‘H.M.S. Pinafore’ at Olney Theatre Center

Something for everybody. That’s what comes to mind when I think about the Chicago-based The Hypocrites’ whiplash-inducing, gender-flipped spin on Gibert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore. Trying to...

‘Broadway Barks’ (and Meows!) in Shubert Alley

A dazzling roster of Broadway stars turned out for the 20th anniversary of Broadway Barks in Shubert Alley to find new loving homes for adoptable dogs and cats from more than two dozen shelters in the...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Dragon Hunting Support Group’

The theater students at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, MD, are a plucky bunch. When the school had no funds for production, they organized as a club and got a budget from the Student...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Musical Therapy’

By Garine Isassi Musical Therapy is a musical comedy for adults by two talents out of Chicago: Joey Katsiroubas (music and lyrics) and Dan Hass (book). The basic storyline of this romantic farce...

Review: ‘Heathers the Musical’ by Wildwood Summer Theater

With book, music, and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe and Kevin Murphy, Heathers the Musical is a faithful rock musical adaptation of the 1988 hit film Heathers, a dark comedy complete with a confused...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘A Slow Bullet’

I am so, so glad we’re finally talking about mental illness and suicide. According to the most recent CDC statistic, there are 800,000 suicides a year in the United States alone (that’s 123 people a...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘On the Eve’

By Isabel Echavarria Dive into the world of legendary characters of fairy tales, literature, and history at On the Eve by Amy Frey. This show explores the confusion and desperation that iconic...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Marx in Soho’

Marx in Soho is a one-man show written in 1999 by the late historian Howard Zinn. It was re-mounted by Iron Age Theatre for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2004, produced and directed by John...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘MasterMimes: The Show’

MasterMimes: The Show, created and performed by Gabe Simms and Julianne Nogar, presents a series of … what to call them — vignettes? Scenes? Dances? — without words, accompanied by music. The...

Review: ‘Heard It Through the Grapevine – A Tribute to Motown’ at the Gaithersburg Arts Barn

“Motown is the soundtrack of people’s lives,” intoned Mack Leamon in his portrayal of legendary Motown record label founder Berry Gordy in Director/Writer/Choreographer Kashi-Tara’s musical Heard It...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘1 2 3: a play about abandonment and ballroom dancing’

What becomes of the children of famous (or notorious) people later in their lives is fertile ground for fiction as well as documentary storytellers. One of the best of the genre is E.L. Doctorow’s...

Review: ‘Becky’s New Car’ at Bowie Community Theatre

Becky’s New Car, written by Steven Dietz and directed by Ilene Chalmers, is a fourth-wall busting farce with an enormous heart. Now playing at Bowie Community Theatre, this production takes the...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘The Unaccompanied Minor’

Comedy. It isn’t always pretty. And sometimes it isn’t even funny. In the case of Elan Zafir’s biographical one-man show The Unaccompanied Minor, although it’s billed as a comedy, it really isn’t all...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Spook’

Actor-Writer-Revolutionary Meshaun Labrone has done it again. Two years ago he brought back Power! to Fringe. That drama about Stokely Carmichael I called “one of the best-written, best-acted, and...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Deadlie Affairs: Arden of Faversham’ by Guillotine Theatre

Aaaahhh, DC. The theatre town we love to pretend we hate. A city saturated with classically-trained talent whose bread and butter is day-player bits on true crime dramas – the ones I used to...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Holon!’

by Isabel Echavarria Holon!, created and performed by Claire Alrich, Sarah Greenbaum, Sadie Leigh, and Meg Lowey, engages the audience in a dance and music-based performance. Rather than conveying a...

Review: ‘The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey’ at 1st Stage Tysons

“The dark side is my beat.” These are some of the first words heard from a New Jersey detective in The Absolute Brightness of Leonard Pelkey. He is recalling a hate crime from a decade previously that...

Review: ‘Steel Magnolias’ by Wolf Pack Theatre Company

Steel Magnolias, by playwright Robert Harling, tells the southern-style story of a group of women who grow close while hanging together in a small-town, northwest Louisiana beauty shop. Truvy Jones...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Tales of The Mysterious and Grotesque: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe’

The Phenomenal Animals, in conjunction with Capital Fringe 2018, present, Tales of The Mysterious and Grotesque: The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, an original work by Robert Cousins, directed by Savannah...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Phantom Limb’

Could I be addicted to my smartphone? It’s a question that has drifted across most of our minds at some point – a vague blip on the radar, quickly rationalized and moved to the mental backburner...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘F*ck Tinder: A Love Story’

By Ellie Milewski What takes more courage than getting up on a stage by yourself and doing a one-man show? How about getting up on stage and doing an unscripted one-man show about the details of your...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Bartleby, the Magical White Coworker’

White men win again — that seems to be the moral of Bartleby, the Magical White Coworker, written by Jeff Reiser and Chinwe Nwosu and directed by Jordyn Nicole. When Bartleby, an incompetent janitor...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Hexagon 2018: Tweet Land of Liberty’

The all-volunteer organization Hexagon, “DC’s only original political satirical musical comedy troupe,” has been around since 1955 and has long been a Fringe fan fave. Its signature productions are...

2018 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Isadora Duncan: Landscapes of the Soul’

Church basements have a long and surprisingly illustrious history in the evolution of modern dance, particularly in the mid-20th-century when they were creative strongholds for iconoclastic...

Riverside Center Welcomes One Singular Sensation with ‘A Chorus Line’

Riverside Center for the Performing Arts in Fredericksburg, Virginia is excited to be celebrating 20 years of bringing the best of Broadway in Virginia with the legendary and iconic Broadway musical,...

Review: ‘Damned If You Do’ by Upright Citizens Brigade at Woolly Mammoth

By Beatrice Loayza “So, what are we seeing again?” my friend asks me at dinner prior to the show. Pause. I scrape the corners of my mind for a suitable answer, but the reality is– “I have no clue.”...