Lyme Park
January 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Kavita (Lynette Rathnam) hasn’t given up on reality entirely. She’s just decided to bookmark it for a while. And why not, when there’s another story to live, a warm, rich world lying beyond the curve of each turned page? Kavita has put all of her earthly love into her copy of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”, hoping that the novel might infuse her own ordinary life with some bright, rustling romance. [Read more...]
Return to Haifa – finding empathy on embattled ground
January 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Starting Saturday, January 15th, Theater J will host a two-week run of Return to Haifa, an adaptation by Israeli journalist and playwright Boaz Gaon of Ghassan Kanafani’s 1969 novella. Discounting a plagiarized version done by the Next Theatre Company in Illinois, this will be the play’s first production in the United States. [Read more...]
Maria la O and I Pagliacci
January 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Take advantage of the brief opportunity to see The In Series’ opera, I Pagliacci. Even if you don’t know opera you might discover that you are already familiar with one of the best known arias in all of the repertoire, Vesti la giubba, by composer Ruggero Leoncavallo. Joe Banno has directed a pair of “pocket operas” in a fascinating mirroring of artists’ blurring emotional artifice with real life relationships. Like a game of Clue, the operas give us two rounds of murder. Both feature a knife as the murder weapon. And the room where each murder takes place? One sets the deed in a Havana nightclub and the other a restaurant in Little Italy. (I won’t announce the murderer but it’s not Colonel Mustard.) I will say it’s the opera Pagliacci that really delivers. [Read more...]
Being Harold Pinter reading illuminates the work of Belarus underground theatre
January 11, 2011 By 1 Comment
On Monday, January 17th, DC area actors join actors in other cities in reading Being Harold Pinter, the newest work by Belarus Free Theatre. The play incorporates letters from Belarusian political prisoners with excerpts from Harold Pinter’s lifetime of writings, especially his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Ben Brantley, writing for the NY Times, has called the play “a work of harrowing intensity and commitment … a testament to the power of a single playwright to inspire, illuminate and give articulate voice to powerlessness.” [Read more...]
Merman, Martin and Cook – Oh My!
January 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment
That amazing time machine, video recordings, is at it again! Theatre lovers have a new opportunity to revisit the 1950s and 1960s when network television offered performances by some of Broadway’s biggest stars singing some of the great songs of the American musical stage.
A company called Video Artists International is building an impressive catalogue of DVDs of both black and white and color television programming of note. The company isn’t exactly new, it has been doing this now for nearly three decades. (It is hard to believe that three decades ago some of these television treasures were already three decades old!) The catalogue has begun to assume something of a critical mass. [Read more...]
Let Me Down Easy
January 10, 2011 By 1 Comment
Anna Deavere Smith glides in and out of personas with the ease of just-cut hair slipping to the barber’s floor. Her quicksilver qualities and keen listening skills are beautifully utilized in the one-woman show Let Me Down Easy, a meditation on the body—how we push it, honor it, dismiss it, and prepare it for death. [Read more...]
Magic
January 9, 2011 By 5 Comments
To the earliest humans, everything was magic, from the rising and setting of the Sun to the way that flint could change a pile of dry sticks and leaves into a fire. That is to say, the everyday processes by which they lived were incomprehensible to them, and they called upon their invisible gods (usually through the medium of priests) to grow their crops, protect their animals and make the people fertile and prosperous. The priests would bestow blessings, sprinkle things with water and arrange for human sacrifices as necessary. [Read more...]
The Great Game: Afghanistan returns for 2 private performances
January 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The Great Game: Afghanistan – a seven-hour, three-play set of nineteen distinct stories covering nearly two centuries of superpower adventures in Afghanistan which played at Shakespeare Theatre’s Sidney Harman Hall last September – is coming back for a two-day engagement before an exclusive audience next month. Who is the exclusive audience? Pentagon staff, policymakers, humanitarian aid workers, the military and their guests. [Read more...]
Theatre Lab to train, cast novices for big musical
January 9, 2011 By 1 Comment
The The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts is offering a musical theater training program for novices with a twist – at the end of the program, you’re in a show.
The musical will be Rags, which tracks the experiences of immigrants to America during the early twentieth century. It was a collaboration between Steven Schwartz (Wicked), Charles Strouse (Annie) and Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof), enjoyed a brief run on Broadway in 1986 and is now periodically produced in regional theatres. Theatre Labs’ production will be April 14-23 in the Theatre Lab auditorium. [Read more...]
Red Bastard is coming to town, and he’s no Santa Claus
January 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Who is this man, this beast, this Red Bastard? He is not – to reassure readers of a certain age – Joe Stalin, back from the dead. Nor is he Christopher Hitchens, who some consider a well-read bastard. He is, instead, a roly-poly anti-clown, as red as a fire-truck, a provocateur, a confronter, a producer of surprise barks of laughter.
Who is the provoked, the confronted, the barker? You, apparently. [Read more...]
