2019

Review: ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ by Scena Theatre

I love Brecht. My heart and soul were ready for Scena Theatre’s production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (written during World War II but not produced in America until the late 1950s) – a play...

Review: ‘GALAS’ at Theatre at St. John’s

In honor of this month’s celebration of Stonewall50/World Pride, Theatre at St. John’s, in association with Yorick Theater Company, presents the first-ever revival of Charles Ludlam’s GALAS (1983)....

Review: ‘Falsettos’ National Tour at the Kennedy Center

The motley crew of neurotic and quasi-neurotic characters in Falsettos, now playing at the Kennedy Center, offers an eye-opening look at all-too-human dilemmas. The rituals of everyday life under...

Review: ‘[Veil Widow Conspiracy]’ at New York Theatre Workshop

Following their two nominations from the prestigious Drama Desk Awards for last season’s Henry VI: Shakespeare’s Trilogy in Two Parts and a Special Award honoring Founding Artistic Producing Director...

Magic Time!: ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ at Round House Theatre

How do I love this play? Let me count the ways. My colleague David Siegel’s review heaps accolades on the Round House Theatre production of Lucas Hnath’s A Doll’s House, Part 2, now playing at the...

Watching the Tonys with DC Theater Arts

DC Theater Arts hosted a rousing Tony Awards watch party at DC sports bar Penn Social last Sunday. An enthusiastic crowd of Broadway fans competed for ticket prizes and answered trivia questions posed...

Jets and Sharks: Is the BSO Missing an Opportunity?

Much of my career has been spent as a health sciences writer. This training helps keep in check my music critic’s right brained instinct to find metaphors in a story. It’s a good restraint to have,...

Review: ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ at Round House Theatre

Battle lines drawn. Cogent argument made. Can everyone be right at the same time? Does it matter in a world full of choices? Invigorating and decidedly bracing, the Round House production of A Doll’s...

Washington Performing Arts and Council Member David Grosso Present Politics & Art: District Vox, June 13

Now in its fifth year, Politics & Art: District Vox is an annual “Made in D.C.” performing arts showcase presented by Councilmember David Grosso and Washington Performing Arts’ Mars Arts D.C....

Review: ‘Disney’s Beauty and the Beast’ at Creative Cauldron

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is a popular show right now with several venues running it around the same time. Creative Cauldron makes a grand entrance with their version of Disney’s Beauty and the...

Review: ‘The Oldest Boy’ at Spooky Action Theater

Sarah Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy is a graceful meditation on motherhood: its joys, its sorrows, and its unforeseeable costs. Director Kathryn Chase Bryer offers a visually lovely and emotionally moving...

Review: ‘Forest Treás’ by Pointless Theatre Company

Pointless Theatre Company presents the world premiere of Forest Treás (pronounced ‘Triage’). Written by Navid Azeez, the play is based around the 2002 Beltway Sniper attacks and the effects the 22-day...

Magic Time!: ‘The Oldest Boy’ at Spooky Action Theater

Sara Ruhl’s The Oldest Boy tells a gut-wrenching story serenely, almost gently. At the heart of it is the bond between mother and child, a tie that Ruhl knew intimately when she wrote the play,...

Chamber Dance Project Brings ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ From Page to Stage

‘‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?” asked T.S. Eliot’s protagonist in the confessional modernist masterwork “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Through a world-premier devised performance,...

Review: ‘Gwen & Ida: The Object is of No Importance’ by Nu Sass Productions and Uncle Funsy at Caos On F

With the world premiere of DC playwright David Kessler’s fictional memory play, Gwen & Ida: The Object is of No Importance, Nu Sass & Uncle Funsy present an enlightening window into the lives and...

Review: ‘Old Time Music Hall’ by The British Players

It’s June, a time for anniversaries, celebrations and commemorations. Where can you simultaneously look back with fond nostalgia at British pluck and cheek, and party for Pride month? How about at The...

Celebrate Gay Pride Month with Special Shows in NYC

If you’re in NYC in June, there is a full calendar of events to commemorate Gay Pride Month. This year is especially significant in marking the 50th anniversary of the seminal Stonewall Uprising and a...

Review: ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ at Workhouse Arts Center

The Workhouse Arts Center rocks an audacious combination of classic rock, classic longing, and sci-fi horror show in a hyperkinetic presentation of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken’s Little Shop of...

Review: ‘A Fox on the Fairway’ by The Little Theatre of Alexandria

The Quail Valley Country Club is the setting for Ken Ludwig’s A Fox on the Fairway, and the annual golf tournament against their rivals, Crouching Squirrel Country Club, is at hand. Quail Valley’s...

Review: ‘Princess Ida’ by The Victorian Lyric Opera Company

Princess Ida, now being presented by The Victorian Lyric Opera Company (VLOC), is something of an odd duck in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory. It has three acts, the dialogue is in blank verse, and...

Review: ‘How the Other Half Loves’ at Montgomery Playhouse

Farces are hard to do well or differently, but they nearly always impart an important lesson: always tell the truth. How the Other Half Loves is an innovative farce, replete with secret affairs,...

Review: ‘Hello, Dolly!’ at The Kennedy Center

A matchmaker, dance instructor, legal counsel, and mandolin teacher (among other occupations), Dolly Gallagher Levi is a woman of countless talents and side-hustles in bustling, turn-of-the-century...

Review: ‘Grease’ at Toby’s Dinner Theatre of Columbia

Grease can be a sad tale of peer pressure, teen pregnancy, insecure futures, and violence. Based on a book of the same name by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, the story was about greasers, pre-Beatles...

Report: ‘Technodramatists Performance Laboratory’ at TheaterLab

A new theater-and-tech company combining live performance, experimental music, and interactive games and narratives enhanced with the latest in cutting-edge technology, Technodramatists, under the...

A Lively NSO Dazzles, Hinting of Still More Good Things to Come

Now that National Symphony Orchestra music director Gianandrea Noseda has nearly completed two full seasons – and has signed on to stay through 2025 – a clearer picture of the possibilities we can...

Review: ‘Public Servant’ at Theatre Row

Opening the 40th anniversary season of Theater Breaking Through Barriers is the world premiere of Public Servant by Bekah Brunstetter (a co-producer and writer of the Emmy-winning TV series This Is...

A ‘Life-Affirming’ Journey: Playwright Samuel A. Simon and Actor Chuk Obasi Discuss ‘The Actual Dance’

“It is what I am supposed to do in my life,” The Actual Dance playwright Samuel A. Simon told me in a phone interview. He was speaking about the play he developed and has performed that began when he...

Review: ‘The Tale of Serse’ by The In Series

The In Series is a place for thought, debate, history, and innovation. With the noble goal to invigorate contemporary theatre, to create innovations in “opera and song,” to “reimagine these forms,...

Review: ‘Tartuffe’ by Annapolis Shakespeare Company

Annapolis Shakespeare Company’s production of Tartuffe is a delightful rendition of Molière’s classic 1664 French comedy. Directed by Sally Boyett and performed in the outdoor courtyard of Reynolds...

Director Coral Cohen Discusses ‘Between the Threads (Jewish Women Project)’

There are so many intersections in life–so much for creative artists to put before audiences as a way to initiate larger conversations about issues that can divide or bring together. In a devised...

Review: ‘A Misanthrope’ at WSC Avant Bard

The audience didn’t stop laughing all night. Between Matt Minnicino’s rhyming couplet- filled, witty, knowing, sometimes bawdy adaptation (or, as he would have it, “distillation”) of a Molière classic...

A Pre-Tony Awards Recap of the 2018-19 Broadway Season

The numbers are in, and the 2018-19 season – which saw the opening of 38 productions comprising thirteen musicals (eleven original and two revivals), 21 plays (fourteen original and seven revivals),...

‘Level Next: A Celebration of Gospel Choirs’ To Showcase DC’s Gospel Sound at Strathmore

With more than 50 years of DC gospel music history between them, two of the DMV’s finest choirs, Washington Performing Arts’ Men & Women of the Gospel Choir and Children of the Gospel Choir, join...

The Kennedy Center Previews Its New Addition, The REACH

With construction ongoing but substantially completed, The Kennedy Center recently threw open the doors on May 29, 2019 to its new addition, The REACH. It was a glorious day to take in the swooping...

‘Pointed Conversations’: A New Community Engagement Initiative from Pointless Theatre

Pointed Conversations invites members of the community to further engage with Pointless Theatre Company’s artistic work through discussion on the themes and ideas of their current production....

Review: ‘Tornkid’ by Cohesion Theatre Company and Baltimore Asian Pasifika Arts Collective

For its second show of the season, Cohesion Theatre Company has partnered with the recently-formed Baltimore Asian Pasifika Arts Collective to devise and produce the world premiere of Tornkid, by...

Review: Mark Christopher Lawrence at the DC Comedy Loft

Mark Christopher Lawrence is a comedian of myriad talents. Appearing at the Bier Baron Tavern’s Comedy Loft, Mr. Lawrence commanded the stage with an act that was multi-dimensional – and with many...

Review: ‘The Talented Clementine’ at Encore Stage & Studio

A new musical based upon Sara Pennypacker’s book “The Talented Clementine” debuted May 31 at Arlington’s Encore Stage & Studio. Adapted by writer-composer Paul Reisler and children from around the...

Legendary Puppeteer Bill Diamond Helps Bring ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ to Life at Workhouse Arts Center

The Workhouse Arts Center has someone special working closely with its upcoming production of that fan favorite, Little Shop of Horrors–Emmy Award-winning puppet fabricator and performer Bill Diamond....

Post-Play Palaver: ‘Second Body’ at Synetic Theatre

Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Theater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their exchange in...

2019 Drama Desk Awards Presented at The Town Hall

The 64th annual Drama Desk Awards were celebrated tonight, honoring excellence in Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Off-Off-Broadway artists and shows of the 2018-19 season. The star-studded event, which...

Review: ‘Describe the Night’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

Like Marcel Proust’s famous “madeleine moment,” Rajiv Joseph’s ambitious new play Describe the Night, in an exciting, Kafkaesque rendering by Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, finds philosophical...

Review: ‘Stonewall 50’ by Rainbow Theatre Project

In the midst of Pride season, and in the 50th anniversary year of the Stonewall riots that defined the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, Rainbow Theatre Project presents a look at the...

Review: ‘Leaving Iowa’ by Providence Players of Fairfax

Providence Players of Fairfax presents Leaving Iowa, a touching comedy written by Tim Clue and Spike Manton, and directed by Julie Janson. A hilarious homage to the typical American family road trip,...

Review: ‘Towards Zero’ at the Colonial Players of Annapolis

Colonial Players’ production of Towards Zero is an intriguing murder mystery, by one of the genre’s icons. Written by Agatha Christie and Gerald Verner in 1956, the play is based on Christie’s 1944...

The Cappies Honor High School Theater Students in the DMV

Many of us started our journey into theater as high school students. There was just something about the stage that beckoned us. And that continues for today’s high school students. For 20 years,...

15 Questions in 15 Minutes with Jesse Corbin of ‘The Boy Band Project’

Known for his lead roles as the bad-boy heartthrobs in such iconic musicals as Grease, Saturday Night Fever, and The Boy Band Project, Jesse Corbin has the voice, the moves, the acting skills, and the...

Got Plans for the Tony Awards? Now You Do!

I am through being a lonely theater geek, locking myself in my bedroom and shushing non-interested family members throughout the Tony Awards broadcast! This year, I’ve decided to throw myself a party....

Interview: David Dimitri ‘L’homme Cirque, The One-Man Circus’ at Strathmore

By Marilyn Millstone When we think of a circus tightrope performer, most of us think of risk. Fear. Danger. But David Dimitri—whose one-man show L’homme Cirque helps celebrate the Music Center’s new...

Ethan McSweeny Named New Artistic Director of American Shakespeare Center

In historic, hip Staunton Virginia, just a two-hour drive from the Washington, DC area, one of America’s premiere Shakespeare companies has seen a change of leadership. The American Shakespeare Center...