UrbanArias Festival defines a new kind of opera. Will musicals fans follow?
April 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Washington boasts so much music-theatre these days that it’s not surprising the conversation has returned about what is opera, what is a musical, and what is music-theatre. People bring their prejudices, often based on limited experiences, to the conversation, and want to stake out their positions. But now, more than ever, these divisions seem artificial and even a little dangerous. [Read more...]
Stage Door
April 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
The American Century Theater’s (TACT’s) current production of Stage Door at Arlington’s Gunston Theatre Two is a bit of a mess. Or at least it was last Saturday evening. That said, it’s frequently interesting, often amusing, and—albeit quite briefly—surprisingly sad. [Read more...]
Divorciadas, Evangelicas y Vegetarianas
April 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott confronts us with close encounters of the domestic-violent kind. Divorcees, Evangelists and Vegetarians (Divorciadas, evangelicas y vegetarianas), an accessible play both tragic and hysterically funny, is about three needy women at the existential brink of self-destruction or complete madness. It exposes what women often hide from public view – the debilitating reality of domestic violence. [Read more...]
2011 Curtain Call – the Helen Hayes Award nominated actresses
April 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
“There are more actresses than actors, and they chase after fewer roles. Thus the women in this section deserve to be celebrated not just for their art, but for their courage, optimism and perseverance. In Shakespeare’s time, women’s roles were played by boys, and to this day women’s characters are often written by men; when the day comes that there is true equality on the stage, women like the ones in this section will be responsible for it.” – Tim Treanor [Read more...]
Rags – from auditions to opening night
April 13, 2011 By 3 Comments
It’s Rags time at Theatre Lab
I never had a chance to see the 1986 Broadway production of the musical Rags because, with only 18 previews and 4 performances, it closed before I could use my tickets. [Read more...]
Art
April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
What does it mean, this big, bold painting hanging right in the middle of Art?
You can try to read between the lines for some hidden message, but you’ll draw a blank. The painting has no lines to read between. No color, form, pattern, or texture either, for that matter, save for some tiny diagonal flecks that may — perhaps — appear when viewed from a certain angle. From top to bottom, it’s white. Nothing more. One wonders if the canvas has been painted at all. And it just cost Serge, an aspiring art-collector, 200,000 hard-earned francs. [Read more...]
Michener’s South Pacific
April 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Last September I told you about a book covering the fascinating topic of how Rodgers, Hammerstein and Logan created the musical South Pacific out of James Michener’s pulitzer prize winning novel “Tales of the South Pacific.” Now, as they say, you can read “the rest of the story!” [Read more...]
The Walworth Farce
April 12, 2011 By 1 Comment
Enda Walsh, the featured playwright of The New Ireland Festival at Studio Theatre, defies easy classification. But one thing is sure: whether he grabs part of the myth of Odysseus and resets it at the bottom of a drained swimming pool as in Penelope or uses the bashed-in skeleton of a London Council flat to set a doomed farce as in The Walworth Farce, you can believe he will take you on a dizzying descent through the deepest recesses of the brain to the stem brain where he exposes our most base emotions of terror and rage. [Read more...]
Supremes reject Wildely imaginative arguments, throw booklet at Ideal villain
April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Oyez, oyez, oyez, all you girlz and boyez! Last night, the Honorable the Supreme Court of the United States (supplemented by Judges from the Honorable the Less Supreme Courts) let the extortion conviction of celebrated blackmailer Laura Cheveley stand in the face of a slew of imaginative arguments presented by her gifted counsel, Beth Wilkinson. [Read more...]
2011 Curtain Call – the Helen Hayes Award nominated creative collaborators
April 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Beginning today, DC Theatre Scene will roll out our annual Curtain Call feature to tell you about some of last year’s most exceptional theatre from the best source possible: the artists who created it.
As the 2011 Helen Hayes Awards ceremony approaches, our five part 2011 Curtain Call presents nearly 100 of the playwrights, designers, directors, actors and producers who turned bare stages into portals to other worlds where anything was possible. They will show us the secret heart of theater, in which craft fuses with imagination to create stories that startle us with laughter and move our own hearts with insight and catharsis. [Read more...]
