Much Ado About Nothing – Riot Grrrls style
September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It seems there are three simple rules to staging Shakespeare successfully. One: put the play in a modern setting, like, say, a dive bar in Anytown, country unknown. Second, inject as much action as possible into the working script, quickening the pace to modern tastes. Third, no matter how clunky or inappropriate it may sound, do not monkey with the Bard of Avon’s dialogue. [Read more...]
The Habit of Art
September 14, 2011 By 1 Comment
To begin with, The Habit of Art is not a play about an imagined encounter between W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, late in their lives. It is a play about a play about this fictional encounter. Imagine Stoppard’s The Invention of Love having a love child with Noises Off, and you begin to understand what Alan Bennett renders here. [Read more...]
Don’t Dress for Dinner
September 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
If you are looking for a crowd pleaser to open your theatre’s season, a fine farce like Don’t Dress for Dinner is an excellent choice. 1st Stage launches its new year with an enjoyable production of a famous French classic work from the late Marc Camoletti, best known as the author of the recent successful Broadway revival Boeing-Boeing. [Read more...]
Knickerbocker Holiday – Concert reading
September 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Some musicals become identified with a single hit song from their scores. The downside of that is that such fame or notoriety can keep us from discovering the pleasures of the rest of the score. [Read more...]
Tosca
September 13, 2011 By 4 Comments
Opening night of the Washington National Opera celebrated both a new leader at the helm and a new partnership with The Kennedy Center. Like a marriage ceremony, there is now a commitment on both sides to make this relationship work and contribute to the thriving of both parties. Showing up Saturday night were Washington’s well-heeled to bless the union at an affair that proved to be both classy and artfully produced. [Read more...]
Follies
September 13, 2011 By 3 Comments
Sondheim’s Follies is back on Broadway, and in this time of earthquakes, hurricanes and political chaos, that’s a good thing.
Set in 1971, for two and a half hours it permits us escape into the complicated psychological landscape of four very average folks, two of whom graced the stage as chorus girls in an imagined production of Dmitri Weissmann’s “Follies” thirty years earlier. [Read more...]
The Hollow
September 13, 2011 By 8 Comments
Who is that boogeyman scaring the gullible and accommodating? Is it the headless Hessian wreaking terror on the residents of Sleepy Hollow, immortalized in Washington Irving’s classic 1820 tale, or playwright Hunter Foster through his world premiere musical The Hollow, at Arlington’s Signature Theatre? [Read more...]
A Raisin in the Sun
September 13, 2011 By 1 Comment
A Raisin in the Sun was groundbreaking in 1959 and is heartbreaking in 2011. Lorraine Hansberry’s play about a working class black family in Chicago chasing middle class dreams is vivid, vital and fiercely wrought more than 50 years later in an eloquent and robust production at Everyman Theatre. [Read more...]
The Boy Detective Fails
September 13, 2011 By 2 Comments
Who would’ve bet that a musical, by turns wacky and heartfelt, guided by a suicidal narrator struggling with his sanity—himself a metafictional send-up of anachronistic boys’ detective fiction—populated by cartoon characters and plotted as an unsolved murder mystery while actually a poignant survivors’ tale of healing, would work?
Signature Theatre took the bet and it pays off swimmingly. [Read more...]
The Country Girl
September 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment
In the very first scene of Clifford Odets’ The Country Girl, Frank Elgin (Brian Crane), is auditioning for a play. In the course of improvising a character, he says: “I have to like him or I can’t get inside him.” This single line of dialogue turns out to be a harbinger for all that follows. [Read more...]
