an evening of 10 minute plays
The theme offered to playwrights in this category is finding yourself or a long lost love. These plays ask what you are seeking, but also what you might be willing to lose in the process. [Read more...]
Wicked
June 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Every generation has its musical, and all lovers of musicals remember that first big show that knocked their socks off and whose songs they were singing months afterwards. Judging by the approving roar at the opening night of the national touring company’s Kennedy Center run, Wicked, the Stephen Schwartz/Winnie Holzman 2003 blockbuster musical, not only claims that magical spot but is already something of a cult classic. Who wants to resist the spell that this big (in every sense of the word) musical casts? [Read more...]
My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra
June 20, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Infinity Theater Company opens its 2011 summer season with a swinging tribute to Ol’ Blue Eyes in My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra. Conceived by David Grapes and Todd Olson, My Way invites its audience to take a trip down memory lane while reliving Sinatra’s remarkable five-decade career. [Read more...]
Source Festival: Heroes and Villains
June 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment
an evening of 10 minute plays
The theme offered to playwrights in this category is “The good, bad and ugly” thus, these plays are meant to “explore humanity’s best and worst players.” [Read more...]
Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark
June 18, 2011 By 5 Comments
It pains me to say it, but the new Spidey musical, which finally came to rest at the Foxwood Theatre on 42nd Street after a very tough start, should more aptly be called Spider-Man: Turn off the Noise. [Read more...]
DC actors join national casts celebrating African American theatres with reading on June 20
June 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
On Monday, June 20, 2011, 17 African-American theatre companies across the country will take part in the first annual celebration of African-American Theatre by producing benefit staged readings of Alice Childress’ Obie Award winning Trouble in Mind. [Read more...]
Nacirema
June 16, 2011 By 1 Comment
We have been telling each other stories through theater for twenty-seven hundred years, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it better. Two hundred years ago, a proposal to sing songs in the middle of a play would have brought howls of outrage; now we have musicals about religious books. Five years ago the innovative (and woefully underutilized) director Christopher Gallu added video to an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, turning the tiny Capital Hill Arts Workshop into a space large enough to encompass a whole city. The technology exists to amplify theater with video as well as music, flat art and dance. What’s holding us back? [Read more...]
Spacebar: A Broadway play by Kyle Sugarman
June 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
As Spacebar opens, Kyle Sugarman’s dad (Brian Razzino, good in this) is dragging himself into Kyle’s room, carrying a neat whiskey for fortification. He looks like he is preparing himself to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dog. He draws himself up, and then delivers an astounding monologue – shocking, howlingly funny, bitter, profoundly tragic. It is brilliant! It is too much! It’s not a monologue – it’s an audition piece! [Read more...]
I Wish You Love
June 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Cozying up in the Terrace Theatre for Penumbra Theatre Company’s reverent musical portrait of Nat King Cole is like taking a nice, long, lukewarm bath. The unvarying pace lulls you into a state of quiet nodding. Familiar melodies massage your ears. The show’s plot raises no challenges or difficult questions. By the time audiences leave two and a half hours later, pleasantly slack-minded with nostalgia, it seems a little odd to think of I Wish You Love as a drama – or even really a work of theatre. [Read more...]
Purge
June 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Colleen Delany as Zara and Kerry Waters as Old Aliide (Photo: Don Summers, Jr.)
When Aliide looks out her window, across her silent stretch of rural Estonian farmland, she sees a country sent reeling from the impact of Soviet occupation. Cold-eyed and resolute, she is the kind of hardened survivor who stands at the center of some of the most moving historical dramas. Her role in Sofi Oksanen’s 2007 play — which the Finnish-Estonian writer has turned into a bestselling novel of the same name — has stuck with millions of readers across three dozen languages. The quiet turmoil of one lonely soul, Oksanen shows us, can resound with meaning for many, once it’s given a little time and some devoted space. [Read more...]
