2010 Helen Hayes Award Nominees announced
February 28, 2011 By 1 Comment
We will remember 2010 as the year in which Arena Stage received three Helen Hayes nominations for outstanding resident musical and no one else – not even the venerable musicmeisters at Signature – got more than one. We will remember 2010 as the year in which Folger Theatre received three nominations for outstanding resident play. In other words, it was the best of times, and the worst of times, for eager theater artists as Helen Hayes Chair Victor Shargai revealed the names of the one hundred fifty-six nominees for the Awards’ twenty-six honors. [Read more...]
Erin Weaver from Comedy of Errors
February 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Erin Weaver on playing Luciana in the Folger’s The Comedy of Errors
It didn’t surprise me when Erin Weaver was awarded The Helen Hayes Award for her performance as Thomasina Coverly in Folger’s Arcadia; I have been a fan of hers since I saw her face full of schmutz and swinging an oversized broom while singing about a “Castle on a Cloud” in Les Misérables. In Philly, I watched her perform in musicals at The Arden. Here, in Bethesda, Erin captivated audiences with her funny performance in the musical based on a Mark Twain short story at Round House Theatre. This year she wowed critics and audiences with her performance in A Wrinkle in Time. Now she’s running in and out of doors in her husband Aaron Posner’s marathon-running The Comedy of Errors. What’s her secret? Read on… [Read more...]
One Flea Spare
February 28, 2011 By 1 Comment
If Angels in America, given magnificent voice by Forum Theatre last year, showed us what love in the age of plague was like, Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare shows us plague spread out on a loveless plain, where pain thrives in the absence of mercy. Another way to say this is that One Flea Spare is a play about a month spent in Hell; it is a hell of a play, and Forum plays the hell out of it. [Read more...]
INTERSECTIONS festival starts this weekend
February 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment
INTERSECTIONS: A New America Arts Festival, now in its second year
Artists know full well that when a new project debuts, it’s not always clear who’s going to show up to see it. Given the constant challenges of reaching and cultivating an audience, the idea of getting a whole festival up on its feet can seem daunting indeed. [Read more...]
West Side Story on tour
February 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
Richard Seff, on vacation, leaves the beach to see the West Side Story touring company
The Broward Center of the Performing Arts in Ft. Lauderdale is currently presenting the recent revival of West Side Story, following its two year run at the Winter Garden on Broadway. When it closes here on February 27th, it will tour the nation, and I’m giving you a heads-up. If it comes within 50 miles of you, see it. It’s brilliant. [Read more...]
Dancer Ryan Watkinson tells us how to succeed on Broadway
February 25, 2011 By 8 Comments
When a local talent makes it to the Big White Way – and is about to open in the new revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starring Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry Potter” and Equus) – you can’t help but smile and applaud his efforts. [Read more...]
Work by Austin, Bradbury, Platt to headline Round House season
February 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Round House Theatre will continue its traditional attention to classic literature during its 2011-2012 season, the Company has announced, producing adaptations of much-revered novels by Jane Austin, James Agee and Ray Bradbury. But it will also feature the world premiere of a take on the Odyssey by emerging playwright Jason Grey Platt, whose seek/strive/find provoked a stir in DC’s 2009 Inkwell Incubator festival. [Read more...]
Project Brand New 2.0
February 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Here and gone in the twinkling of an eye, Round Two of Solas Nua’sProject Brand New” opened and closed at Flashpoint’s Mead Theatre Lab in one weekend with a quartet of works-in-progress, direct from the always bubbling artistic cauldron of Dublin’s theatrical Fringe scene. More or less one-person shows, the featured works included excerpts from Dylan Tighe’s Journey to the End of Night and Sorcha Kenny’s My Life in Dresses, as well as Niamh McCann’s Welcome to the Forty Foot and Matthew Morris’ solo dance piece, My Body Travels. [Read more...]
Gary Lee Maker, superstar audience member, dead at 68
February 23, 2011 By 2 Comments
Gary Lee Maker, who once organized a little theater for the English-speaking community in Italy and later became one of the most loving supporters of professional theater in the DC theater community, succumbed to cancer on Thursday, February 17, 2011 at the Casey Hospice in Rockville, MD. He was sixty-eight. [Read more...]
Juno and the Paycock
February 23, 2011 By 1 Comment
To understand Juno and the Paycock, and the masterful production it’s getting from the Washington Shakespeare Company, imagine Laurel and Hardy in Beirut. Imagine Ralph Kramden meeting Moammar al-Gaddhafi, or Fred Flintstone at the moment the comet hits, or anything, really, by Brendan Behan. Sean O’Casey creates – and WSC delivers – an uproarious domestic comedy, but instead of a punch line, it delivers a sucker-punch to the gut, which lets in all the cold sad air of the real world. [Read more...]
