All posts by Leslie Weisman:
Leslie Weisman DCTS Reviewer A longtime subscriber to a half-dozen DC theatres, Leslie also writes for the Washington DC Film Society, where her articles on the Berlin and Munich film festivals appear regularly in the Society's online newsletter Storyboard. Leslie is also a regular contributor to the Orson Welles website Wellesnet.com, and wrote a review for the site of the play Obediently Yours, Orson Welles which she saw in its Paris and Barcelona premieres.
Bust
December 6, 2011 By 1 Comment
When HBO and Comedy Central’s Lauren Weedman decided to take her comedic sensibilities to the jailhouse and teach a writing workshop, her good intentions were tinged with a sense of noblesse oblige, as Weedman herself would be the first to admit. But we all know where good intentions lead. Rather than teach a writing course, Weedman winds up becoming what’s known as a volunteer advocate. Any idealism she may have felt at the start will take a sharp turn toward realism. [Read more...]
Norman
October 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It isn’t often that a production will justify a reviewer’s use of the delightful word “pixilated,” especially as a homonym. That said, if ever there was a time, it is now. In Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon’s utterly transfixing and transporting 4D tribute to Scots-Canadian pioneer filmmaker Norman McLaren, here for a brief three-day engagement at the Kennedy Center, both the filmmaker and his revolutionary animation films are nothing less than pixilated. Friday night, with the assistance of dancer-choreographer Peter Trosztmer, they drew their animated audience irresistibly along with them. [Read more...]
Lungs
October 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the magnificent productions on DC theater boards, their elegant sets and colorful costumes either enhancing or competing with the luscious language emanating from lushly made-up mouths of too many characters to count without a playbook? If so, does Studio Theatre have a play for you. [Read more...]
The Green Bird
May 10, 2011 By 9 Comments
Fairy tales and philosophy should make for strange bedfellows, and, at least in theory, even stranger bedtime stories. But in Constellation Theatre Company’s wondrous production of the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird, the two cozy up with remarkable affinity. Like all good relationships, they also bring things out in each other that even their best friends never would have guessed were there. Constellation’s artistic director Allison Arkell Stockman adapted and directs, commedia dell’arte-style, with not simply a creative thirst that drinks in fantasy, but gives the play the power to make audiences drunk on it. [Read more...]
Magnificent Waste
April 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. While those ominous words may not hang above Flashpoint’s door, Dante would recognize this place.
Cautiously making our way around the darkened room — the seats are roped off with black ribbon — accompanied by a jazzy score with otherworldly tones, we are both beckoned and repelled by an aural and visual cacophony coming from installations along the length of the stage. Intrigued by their blinking, beeping, honking (that’s the traffic video center stage on a six-by-eight-foot screen) and hypnotically rippling (its little video brother right beside it), we almost trip over the metal-framed cube at the entryway. [Read more...]
Fragments
April 18, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Say the name Samuel Beckett, and most people think: Waiting for Godot, existentialism. Theatre of the absurd, where absurd means meaningless. As we watch Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne’s spare but striking staging of five uneasy pieces by the late Irish playwright, the word also takes on its more everyday meaning. And we realize that Beckett is not only one of us. He sees inside of us. [Read more...]
Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending
November 16, 2010 By 4 Comments
Fresh from winning both Best Overall Show and Audience Choice Best Comedy at this summer’s Pick of the Fringe Awards, Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending is back with both a bang and a whimper, courtesy of two characters who in the original are relatively minor. Here they come forcefully into their own, in Ann and Shawn Fraistat’s irreverent take on what is arguably (or so conventional wisdom has it) everybody’s favorite Shakespeare play. [Read more...]
The War of the Worlds
November 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment
The “terrifying broadcast that panicked a nation!” the night before Halloween more than 70 years ago and sent thousands heading for the hills can now be not only heard, but seen. Scena Theatre has taken the Orson Welles Mercury Theater’s (almost literally) groundbreaking “The War of the Worlds,” based on the eponymous 1898 book by the (almost eponymous; the two would joke about it later on the former’s radio show) H.G Wells — and done what might be called a reverse Welles. [Read more...]
The Little Prince
October 20, 2010 By 7 Comments
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” These words, penned (in French) during the Second World War by writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, will immediately ring a bell with children of all ages and nationalities. [Read more...]
The Comedy of Errors … at Colonus?
May 18, 2010 By 1 Comment
If only your reviewer wrote as rapidly as Lumina’s astoundingly accomplished young performers declaim poetry, verse (and reverse) and verbal pyrotechnics by, and in the manner of Sophocles and Shakespeare, this review would be a stream-of-consciousness critique chock-a-block with tropes, [Read more...]
