REVIEWS
Les Justes
If you think furs, Fabergé eggs, ballet when you think about 20th century Russia, Les Justes is here to remind you that for every lithographed Russian noblewoman traipsing around St. Petersburg in … [Read More]
Yellowman
Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman is a story of black-on-black bigotry, parental abuse, internalized self-loathing, and alcoholism. In other words, just another fun night at the theatre. … [Read More]
Peter Pan: The Boy Who Hated Mothers
Peter Pan always did seem like a rather difficult creature, as far as immortals go. Anyone with such a steadfast refusal to mature or learn anything useful can’t be entirely pleasant to be around … [Read More]
Really Really
If plays are judged by the sheer force of their emotional impact, Really Really – the world premiere of playwright Paul Colaizzo’s contemporary, college-set drama, now playing at Signature Theatre … [Read More]
Mad Love (an Anti-Valentine’s Day Performance)
The Young Playwrights’ Theater is a revelation. Originally founded by playwright Karen Zacarías seventeen years ago, YPT’s After-School Playwriting Program won the National Arts and Humanities … [Read More]
Three Bears
What do you get when you cross three bears, reportedly kicked out on their hinies from the Kennedy Center, with an Animal Control cop from Fairfax County, whose dream is to feature his golden … [Read More]
Ana en el Tropico (Anna in the Tropics)
Nilo Cruz' exquisite verbal symphony about the transforming power of literature simmers with surprising moment-to-moment vitality, thanks to this new Spanish interpretation of the 2003 Pulitzer winner … [Read More]
NEWS
Arena Stage announces its 2012-2013 season
Mary Zimmerman, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient whose adaptations of Candide and The Arabian Nights played here to critical acclaim and box-office success, will bring Metamorphoses, her … [Read More...]
Michael Kahn writes about Strange Interlude for DC Theatre Scene
"Hello, I am Michael Kahn, the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Welcome to my new blog." So begins the first entry in what will be a series of eight weekly articles titled "Stage … [Read More...]
Theatres get ready for gala season. Here’s your invitation to join them
Well, all right, you’ve got some money in your pocket, and you feel like unleashing your own personal stimulus program for Washington area theaters. You know the primary benefit of your … [Read More...]
STAGE INTERLUDES from Michael Kahn
And so we begin
Hello, I am Michael Kahn, the Artistic Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Welcome to my new blog, “Stage Interludes from Michael Kahn.” Every Wednesday for the next eight weeks, I am … [Read More...]
BALTIMORE BACKSTAGE
Acme and UnSaddest team up for Rogue Waves
Last summer, for this column, I took a brief look at Baltimore's Ten-Minute Play Festival, hosted by the UnSaddestFactory Theatre. The most mind-blowing feature of that weekend of occasionally … [Read More...]
Come for the gumbo. Stay for the plays
On Thursday night, January 12th, Preston Street in Baltimore was packed with cars. That was thanks to Itzhak Perlman, an out-of-town violin player who had decided to drop by the Baltimore Symphony and … [Read More...]
New year, big deal for Baltimore
I started writing this article as a retrospective of Baltimore theatre in 2011. But I couldn’t help thinking a little bit about what Baltimore is looking at in 2012. In Baltimore, thanks to the … [Read More...]
NY THEATRE BUZZ
Seminar
Theresa Rebeck is a playwright who combines the politically active mind of the late Lillian Hellman and the brittle wit of the late Jean Kerr, two formidable playwrights who greatly enriched Broadway … [Read More...]
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (revisited)
I caught a matinee of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying this week, and as I watched young Nick Jonas prancing about as J. Pierrepont Finch in the current Broadway revival of the Frank … [Read More...]
Wit
Margaret Edson is that rare bird, a playwright whose first play, Wit, earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. That alone makes her unique, but she becomes more so when we realize that she has never had … [Read More...]
THEATRE SHELF
Comic Opera Guild catalog of early musical theatre
Most dedicated theater music fans are well aware that there was a momentous shift in the evolution of what we now think of as a "musical" in 1915 when Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton, in the cogent … [Read More...]
Gordon MacRea and Howard Keel DVD’s
The pickings from the Bell Telephone Hour that Video Artists International delves into must be getting slim. It isn't that the material on latest releases in VAI' Music's series isn't first rate. … [Read More...]
Show Tunes: The Songs, Shows and Careers of Broadway’s Major Composers – Fourth Edition
I may be excused for presuming that, if you have a theater shelf, it already sports a copy of Steven Suskin's book. Equal parts reliable reference book and entertainingly written opinionated history, … [Read More...]
UP CLOSE WITH THE MOST FASCINATING PEOPLE WE KNOW
Behind the magic of The Magic Flute at The Puppet Co
Three shadowy figures stand on a scaffold high above the stage, looking down on a tangle of eight foot strings and contorting themselves in and around each other to bring inanimate blocks of wood and … [Read More...]
Paige Hernandez on P. Nokio at Imagination Stage
Brimming with energy, Paige Hernandez brings a joyful creativity wherever she goes. As a teaching artist, actor, dancer and choreographer, and a self-professed hip-hop advocate, Hernandez has worked … [Read More...]
Actors Nigel Reed and Valerie Leonard on love and marriage
Love comes naturally to the actors in Love Letters For the busy theatrical couple Nigel Reed and Valerie Leonard, Valentine’s Day is more than a once a year affair. It’s nearly the definition of … [Read More...]
STAGE TO SCREEN – We go to the movies
The Woman in Black
Horror is a tricky genre for both stage and screen. It relies, perhaps more than any other genre, on emotion – evoking a gut-level, sometimes primal terror that makes the viewer forget, just for a … [Read More...]
Pina
One of the few concrete tidbits we learn about German dance choreographer Pina Bausch over the course of the new 3-D documentary “Pina” is that she was a woman of few words. As should rightfully … [Read More...]
Albert Nobbs
Glenn Close doesn’t play Albert Nobbs as a woman passing for a man – she plays the character as sexless. The straight-laced member of the waitstaff at Dublin’s Morrison Hotel keeps a tellingly … [Read More...]
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