2010 Helen Hayes Award Nominees announced

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

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

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...]