DCMetroTheaterArts
Your source for theater news, reviews, and interviews in DC, MD, Northern VA, and New York
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 […]
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 […]
When Mark Medoff‘s award-winning play Children of a Lesser God premiered on Broadway in 1980, followed by the highly-lauded film adaptation in 1986, it provided groundbreaking insights into the need for better communication, understanding, and connection between our deaf and hearing populations. Nearly 40 years later, the first Broadway revival of the romantic drama, now […]
If you’ve ever witnessed (or worse yet, experienced, encouraged, or participated in) the “girl-on-girl crime” of high-school cliques, malicious gossip, fierce competitiveness, and vicious backstabbing, and can still see the humor in it (or at least in the most egregious perpetrators getting their comeuppance!), then Mean Girls – the new musical comedy by Tina Fey […]
What do you get when you cross the super-popular hits Wicked and Frozen with a Boston accent? The laugh-out-loud musical parody Wicked Frozen, presented by John Lant and making its Off-Broadway debut at St. Luke’s Theatre. Created by Toby Singer (music and lyrics) and Zoe Farmingdale (book and lyrics) in 2014, the timing couldn’t be […]
In the current American climate of daily accusations of “fake news,” public denials of misdeeds, not-so-secret cover-ups of illegal activities, and arbitrary job terminations of public officials at the highest levels of our government, the Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 four-hander Lobby Hero (following on the heels of the writer’s 2017 Oscar win for […]
A mash-up of classical music with classic rock, Rocktopia, co-created by vocalist Rob Evan (of New York stage and Trans-Siberian Orchestra fame) and Maestro Randall Craig Fleischer (a noted Conductor, Music Director, Composer, and Arranger), is yet another indication of the growing invasion of Broadway by rock musicals (among them, Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville and […]
London’s blockbuster National Theatre production of Angels in America – Tony Kushner’s sweeping two-part eight-hour epic about AIDS, politics, and gay life in America in the 1980s – has alighted on Broadway for a limited eighteen-week run at the Neil Simon Theatre, 25 years after the plays’ spectacular Broadway debut in 1993. Set at the […]
In Dogs of Rwanda, now making its Off-Broadway debut at Urban Stages, playwright Sean Christopher Lewis revisits the horrors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and the scars they left – both physical and emotional – on a fictitious American writer, who, as a kind of self-help therapy, publishes a book, some 20 years later, about […]
If you’re in the mood for a fun-filled island vacation, look no further than Manhattan Island and the Broadway premiere of Escape to Margaritaville at the Marquis Theatre. With music and lyrics by the iconic Jimmy Buffett and a book by acclaimed TV writers Greg Garcia and Mike O’Malley, the feel-good rom-com jukebox musical provides […]
A new twist on the old adage attributed to former Philadelphia Police Chief and Mayor Frank Rizzo, “A liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged yet,” Lincoln Center Theater’s production of Joshua Harmon’s new play Admissions, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, presents a provocative exposé on the hypocrisy of believing in progressive ideals […]
If you love the New York stage and its stars, but can’t make it to the theater in person to see a live performance, Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon and the world’s largest purveyor of audiobooks, offers another option for theater-lovers around the globe. You can now listen to acoustic in-studio recordings by acclaimed actors, […]
Do you ever wonder about the nature of awareness and the mechanics of perception? Luckily for us, Baba Brinkman does, and returns to SoHo Playhouse with his well-conceived and brilliantly entertaining Rap Guide to Consciousness, a hit in the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe and the latest installment in his signature fusion of hip-hop, humor, and neuroscience. […]
Just concluding his comic roles in the Walnut Street Theatre’s national touring production of Ken Ludwig’s Baskerville: A Sherlock Holmes Mystery, with its final performances this week in California, Virginia, and Maryland, Barrymore Award-winning Philadelphia-based actor Dan Hodge is about to begin previews for his New York debut with Dogs of Rwanda, in its Off-Broadway […]
The latest work by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Jordan Harrison, The Amateurs, now making its world premiere at Vineyard Theatre, is a profound and witty meta-theatrical meditation on the purpose of art and the role of the artist in times of disaster. Devised in the format of a multi-layered play-within-a-play-within-a-play, the momentous self-referencing theme is seen through […]
Through the hand of fate, two lonely and damaged strangers have been brought together in an isolated cabin in the Alaskan wilderness, each suffering the effects of familial trauma, the devastation of love and loss, and the resultant depression that racks their psyches. Presented at The WorkShop Theater by Art of Warr Productions in association […]
Terrence McNally has been a steady contributor as a playwright ever since his first play, And Things That Go Bump In The Night landed on Broadway in 1963. It didn’t bump for long; it played a few previews, then folded after 8 performances. But it lasted long enough for the young author to confirm to […]
Marking the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel of 1818, Frankenstein, a new musical with book, music, and lyrics by Eric B. Sirota, focuses less on the monster and more on the man inside, who longs for acceptance and love. Presented by John Lant, Tamra Pica, and Write Act Repertory, Clint Hromsco directs the […]
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the very successful Encores! series threw us a party by offering its seven audiences (February 7–11) a potpourri of book scenes and musical numbers from eight musicals which had never been shown in their entirety on the Encores! stage at City Center. Jack Viertel and Rob Berman, the artistic and […]