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Jayne Blanchard has been a critic covering DC theater for the past 10 years, most recently for the Washington Times. Prior to that, she was a theater critic in the Twin Cities and a movie reviewer in the Washington area. She is a proud resident of Baltimore.

You Can’t Take It With You

May 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

You think your family’s crazy? Compared to the purposefully pixilated Sycamore-Vanderhof clan — the characters, and I mean characters, populating George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s exuberant comedy You Can’t Take It With You — your relatives probably err on the side of prosaic. You get to hang out with these eccentric lovelies for nearly three, fast-moving hours in Everyman Theatre’s rosy and ebullient staging of the 1936 chestnut. [Read more...]

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Punk Rock Mom

May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What do you do when the black eyeliner fades, the safety pins tarnish, and everyone—not just Johnny Rotten—is pretty vacant? [Read more...]

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Metamorphoses

May 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Everybody in the pool! It’s a pool party of a sublimely archetypal sort in Constellation Theatre’s entrancing staging of Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, directed with flair and a fanciful air by Allison Arkell Stockman. [Read more...]

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Mary Poppins

April 30, 2012 By 1 Comment

True story: My mother took my sister and my seven year-old self to see “Mary Poppins” in 1964 at a downtown Baltimore movie palace—who knows, it could have been the Hippodrome. The gilded theater was filled with mothers in suits and white gloves toting their daughters in crinolined party dresses. [Read more...]

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The Whipping Man at Center Stage

April 21, 2012 By 1 Comment

New Center Stage artistic director Kwame Kwei-Armah gets off to an astonishing start with his directorial debut production of Matthew Lopez’s mesmerizing play The Whipping Man. [Read more...]

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Rapunzel

April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Like Willow Smith, Rapunzel (Felicia Curry) loves her hair. And why shouldn’t she? It is her crowning glory, her plaything, a transportation system, and until Prince Brian (Jonathan Atkinson) comes along, her only friend. [Read more...]

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Basil Twist’s Petrushka

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinocchio may have wished to be a real boy, but Basil Twist’s puppets have the best of both worlds. They are all too human, with souls that burn bright as jewels. But they are also impossibly graceful and balletic, executing astonishing arabesques and leaps that hang in the air like unspoken longings. [Read more...]

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CenterStage’s Into the Woods well worth the trip

March 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Cherry blossoms and the perfumed air of a new spring pale in comparison to the enchantments awaiting indoors at CenterStage, home of a beautiful and liltingly fiendish production of the Sondheim-Lapine musical Into the Woods, a transplant from the Westport Country Playhouse directed by Mark Lamos, who expertly balances the melodic and the mischievous. [Read more...]

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You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

February 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Nothing wishy-washy about Olney Theatre Center’s exuberant, child-sized production of the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Here, the Peanuts gang is rendered with such bright, broad strokes they seem to have leapt from the pen of Charles M. Schulz himself.  [Read more...]

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Red

January 27, 2012 By 1 Comment

There is nothing more thrilling than watching paint dry in Red, the riveting bio-drama by John Logan about the cerebral abstract expressionist Mark Rothko (1903-1970) and his determined young assistant. The Tony Award-winning play arrives in Washington in a sublimely detailed and acted production directed by the Goodman Theatre’s Robert Falls.  [Read more...]

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