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By: Tim Treanor

Two Rooms, produced by Theater Alliance, at H Street Theater

Two Rooms is one of a pair of mainstage productions which anchors Theater Alliance’s ambitious two-month Pangea Project. In Earth’s early days, all land was contained in a single mass. Scientists call this land mass “Pangea”. In Two Rooms, the American hostage Michael Wells (David Johnson) is kept in an empty Beirut cell; his devastated wife Lainie (Katherine Coons) transforms his home office into what she imagines is the cell’s double, exiling all the furniture to the basement; and both rooms are staged in the same space in the production. Things have not changed all that much, playwright Lee Blessing seems to be suggesting.

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Joel Markowitz founder of the Ushers theatre social group will be joining us as a staff musical columnist and Podcast Interviewer. Mr. Markowitz will conduct interviews with the artists behind the scenes of DC’s hottest musicals and offer insight and commentary on the DC theatre scene.   

The Ushers website can be found here.

Hello Musical Fans!  We have a special treat for you.  Not only do we have a review of the show by our own Debbie Minter Jackson but we have a special podcast interview conducted by Ushers founder Joel Markowitz. Just double click on the FLASH player above to play the interview — or check it out on your iPod by searching for DC Theatre Reviews on iTunes!   

Mary Jayne Raleigh, Kat’Taylor and Meegan Midkiff in Becoming George at MetroStage
Photo credit: Stan Barouh 

Review by Debbie Minter Jackson

Becoming George  –  MetroStage

Scene from Becoming George at MetroStage   Jason Hentrich, Mary Jayne Raleigh, 

Meegan Midkiff, Kat'Taylor Photo credit: Stan Barouh

The world premiere musical Becoming George at Metrostage celebrates the life of one of the most colorful, even outrageously artistic figures of all time. Does the musical capture the indomitable spirit, prodigious writings, and mind-boggling life choices of this self-named woman clearly far ahead of her time? Yes, but in its own irresistibly charming way. Becoming George offers a refreshingly light and fun-filled approach to the tumultuous life and times of this celebrated writer whose outpourings from her pen and love decisions of her heart shocked, repelled and fascinated the literary world.

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 Becoming George [14:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (439)

By Tim Treanor

Bold Girls  –  Keegan Theatre

Ah, sweet Belfast - where the women are women and the men are dead.

Keegan Theatre’s latest, Rona Munro’s Bold Girls, begins as a ghost story in an occupied land and ends up as a domestic drama which could have been set in Pinsk, or Peoria. Marie (Ghillian Porter) mourns her dead husband (”a good, good man,” she explains to her young son, “who watches us from above even now.”); her friend Cassie (Helen Pafumi) has a husband and a brother in jail, and Cassie’s mother Nora (Linda High) has a dead husband and a son and son-in-law in jail. These women - the “Bold Girls” of the story’s title - are less waiting for the return of their men than they are waiting for the next terrible, incomprehensible blow from a mean-spirited God and the occupying British army. They are traditional women, whose traditions have been blown to smithereens.

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