Back in college in Minnesota, I was so into the forlorn films of Ingmar Bergman that I think he affected my mental health. I could relate to his bleak Nordic worldview, which I associated with long dark winters and repressive religion, never a good combination. So for years whenever I felt bummed or blue, I […]
Join Best Medicine Rep this Saturday at 1 pm for a free and funny celebration of arts education! New Plays/ New Voices, a second annual festival of work written by Montgomery County Public School students. Each play was written under a grant from the Maryland State Arts Council with Best Medicine Rep’s Artistic Director John Morogiello. The plays will be performed by professional […]
Paper Dolls, the bittersweet new musical that opened at Mosaic Theater Company two weeks ago, has produced standing ovations—and laughter and tears—at every production so far. Yet the show, which broke all records for pre-opening sales and is already one of the top box office successes in Mosaic’s history, is about a situation so improbable […]
Promoted as a hilarious send-up of Christian boy bands, Altar Boyz, with music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker, delivers witty lyrics sprinkled among twelve songs. The storyline consists of the premise that the audience is experiencing the last stop on the Altar Boyz tour, during which they wish to save any […]
Mystic realism and metaphor meet the Irish gift of gab and a dire predilection for alcohol in Conor McPherson’s The Seafarer, a disturbingly dark and devilish comedy about lost souls, drunken misdeeds, and the consequences that follow in life and the hereafter. Directed by Ciarán O’Reilly, the Irish Repertory Theatre’s current production of the 2006 […]
Brilliant. Extraordinary. Ingenious. Superb. The best. Yet all adjectives and superlatives pale in comparison with the truly unsurpassed quality of the script, performances, direction, design, and production of the Broadway premiere of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women at the Golden Theatre. Filled with searing psychological dissections, dark humor, and cunning metaphysical theatricality, Director Joe Mantello […]
One of the most quietly profound moments in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid play “Master Harold”…and the Boys—just opened in a powerfully moving production at Round House Theatre—happens in a simple conversation about a park bench. The exchange is between a white 17-year-old named Hally (Nick Fruit) and an older black man named Sam (the magnificent Craig Wallace), […]
On February 14, 2018, a gunman entered Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students and teachers. On April 3, Playwright Lauren Gunderson made her new play involving gun violence, Natural Shocks, available for royalty-free performances the weekend of April 20, the anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. And on Monday, April 23, Sara Barker […]
It was 6:45 am on March 2nd when Managing Director Leon Seemann received the call informing him that a fire had broken out at Adventure Theatre MTC. Artistic Director Michael Bobbitt was on the other line. The fire had begun over five hours earlier, Bobbitt informed him. No one had been in the building at […]
On a rainy afternoon in 1950, two middle-aged black servants slowly scrub the floor and wipe tables in an empty South African tea room. They banter about an upcoming ballroom dance competition and the older man, Sam, chides his younger colleague, Willie, about his stiff style and missing dance partner, Hilda. Soon they are joined […]
Deb Filler’s love note to the world wends through near-universal musical touchstones, bawdy humor, the joys (or not) of Yiddish, coincidental connections, and the impact of one important musical figure on the life of her family. Deb’s verve and talent are enough to make this one-woman show a good bet. The 12-minute film at its […]
The time is most certainly right for the arts to be disruptive; to assert and insert itself in national discussions about social justice and inclusion. Turbulent times call out for the arts–not merely competency in coding and a thumb on the scales algorithms–if America is to make it through these demanding political and cultural times. […]
Depending on whom you ask, climate change is either ongoing, its devastating progression towards the inevitable oblivion of life on Earth all but inarguable, or a hoax perpetrated by the ignorant or execrable upon the self-deluded or gullible. In the Highwood Theatre’s skillfully mounted and performed production of Nick Blaemire’s SOON, the more urgent matter […]
Collaborative multimedia work is a powerful reflection on tradition and transition. The Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet returns to D.C. on April 19, 2018, with longtime collaborator Wu Man to perform their major collaborative work, A Chinese Home, at Lisner Auditorium, presented by Washington Performing Arts. The program was conceived by pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Kronos’ Artistic […]
Katori Hall’s Hoodoo Love is like a three-hour, heartache-filled blues song. Set in Memphis in the 1930s, the memories of slavery still linger and the reality of life in the south for African Americans is not easy. Arena Players, the longest continuously running African American community theater in the country, squeezes out the juices of […]
With admirable nerve and imagination, Constellation Theatre Company has mounted an endlessly inventive production of a work by a playwright who dares us to enjoy him. Bertolt Brecht wrote plays to make a point. He was not one of those writers, so fashionable nowadays, who eschew messages and proffer experiences devoid of consequences. Thus with […]
As part of LaGuardia Performing Arts Center’s Rough Draft Festival, IRT Theater and TGF 12 Productions have teamed up for a workshop presentation of Stepchild, A New Musical, inspired by the popular children’s story of Cinderella. But this is not the same girl you knew from the 1812 version in Grimms’ Fairy Tales. In the […]
The play En el tiempo de las mariposas (In the Time of the Butterflies), making its D.C. debut at GALA Hispanic Theatre, tells one of the most inspiring and heart-wrenching stories to come out of the Americas: the true tale of the Mirabal sisters, freedom fighters from the Dominican Republic. However, while the play (adapted […]
Let’s face it: things have been a little stressful lately. Everywhere we turn we see violence, corruption, investigations, allegations. Shear Madness, a long-running (over 13,200 performances and counting since 1987!), campy, interactive murder mystery at The Kennedy Center’s Theatre Lab, doesn’t cry about the state of our country; it dives headfirst into it with groan-inducing results, […]
By Andy Arnold If you enter Greenbelt Arts Center expecting Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery to focus on Holmes and Watson, you will be disappointed. What you will find instead is a hilarious whodunit featuring a cast of five playing some 42 characters, featuring costume changes at the drop of the hat. After […]