Written by Mo Willems, and based on his Caldecott Honor award winning book “Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale”, the story takes place in Brooklyn, NY, where Dad accepts the daunting task of taking his toddler daughter, Trixie, with him to the Laundromat. [Read more...]
Knuffle Bunny
May 12, 2010 By 4 Comments
Anyone can relate to the trauma of a child losing a beloved stuffed animal, not to mention the resulting kerfuffle. That’s why Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical really works.
The Ramayana
May 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
Constellation Theatre has tackled the ultimate, a North American premiere of Peter Oswald’s The Ramayana, about the god Rama‘s adventures as he struggles to save his beloved from the clutches of demons. Based on a Sanskrit tale of passion and adventure, Ramayana, [Read more...]
DCTS launches new column today by Brad Hathaway
May 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
Theatre Shelf, a column dedicated to recommending books, CDs and DVDs, launches today, written by Brad Hathaway, one of Washington’s favorite theatre writers. [Read more...]
Finian’s Rainbow
May 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
PS Classics has done us a big favor by capturing one of the most melodious and witty scores ever on Broadway in its entirety – including the never previously recorded harmonica material for the Dance of the Golden Crock. They have also provided a package that serves as a documentation of the production itself with full credits, a bunch of photos and a well-written synopsis [Read more...]
Leonard Bernstein Omnibus
May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The Archive of American Television has launched an effort to present the historic broadcasts of the Omnibus series that offered cultural programming on many Sunday evenings between 1953 and 1961, hosted by the eloquent sophisticate Alistair Cooke. [Read more...]
Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture
May 11, 2010 By 2 Comments
There are two uses for encyclopedias – looking up specifics and browsing through interesting material. Here is a two-volume set that serves the second use quite well, but isn’t comprehensive enough to work for the the first. You wouldn’t pull these volumes off the shelf to look up a specific play, playwright, actor, composer, lyricist, director, producer or critic [Read more...]
The Kid
May 10, 2010 By 1 Comment
Well, it certainly isn’t the movie of the same title, the one that starred Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan way back when. No, it’s one of a plethora of plays and musicals with gay themes that have landed on New York stages this season, many of them excellent, all of them timely and relevant. [Read more...]
Heartstrings / Rifar el Corazon
May 10, 2010 By Leave a Comment
We’ve all been through hellish family reunions so we can relate to Dino Armas’ character-driven, black comedy about two sisters, one a mother, and her disabled daughter. In Teatro de la Luna’s 2004 International Festival of Hispanic Theatre, the Uraguayan Heartstrings won enough praise to inspire artistic director Mario Marcel to revive it in 2010. [Read more...]
Collected Stories
May 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment
If you’re looking for intelligent, well crafted, beautifully structured playwrighting, peppered with dialogue that rings totally true, the season should offer Donald Margulies regularly, and we’d all be nourished and satisfied. Not since Lillian Hellman has a playwright emerged with the ability to consistently tell a good story, [Read more...]
The Graduate
May 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment
One raised leg casts quite a shadow. Anne Bancroft’s brief, famously suggestive moment in the 1967 film – bare calf and thigh, toes perched on the barstool – was too vivid for young Dustin Hoffman to resist, and too memorable for us to ignore. Can a stage play, particularly one written three decades later, teach us any further lessons about the sexual awakenings of Benjamin Braddock and his not-so-coy mistress? [Read more...]
