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Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted
By Christopher Trumbo
Produced by Rep Stage
Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

The colorful title  “Trumbo: Red, White and Blacklisted” is a playful verbal lure that is true to the spirit of its subject.  With a forthrightness that pays tribute to the blacklisted writer’s award-winning screenplays (The Brave One and Roman Holiday earned Oscars, Johnny Got His Gun the Cannes grand jury prize) and his personal correspondence from prison, (more…)

• If You See Something Say Something 
• by Leslie Weisman 

Our story begins at the White Sands Missile Range, a secure military installation in New Mexico.  It’s quite large; “you could fit three Rhode Islands in it,” Mike Daisey tells the capacity audience. (more…)

• The President’s New Clothes 
• by Leslie Weisman

 A timely political take on Hans Christian Andersen’s timeless tale of the clueless monarch, “The President’s New Clothes” has been updated for the fourth time since its inception at the height of the Watergate scandal.  (more…)

• The School for Scandal
• by Richard Brinsley Sheridan
• Directed by Richard Clifford
• Produced by Folger Theatre
• Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

The Folger’s done it again: taken a classic from an earlier era and turned it into a contemporary cautionary tale of a situation so in-the-moment as to have been heralded, just four days into its run, by a Washington Post Style article dissecting the very phenomenon it portrays.  (more…)

• Crumble (lay me down Justin Timberlake)
• by Sheila Callaghan
• Directed by Shirley Serotsky
• Produced by Catalyst Theater Company
• Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

This may be the shortest, sharpest - and the most seemingly effortlessly poetic - play you’ll see outside of the Capital Fringe Festival.  Like some of those memorable mini- quasi- master sketches, “Crumble,” in a little more than an hour, draws an astute and affecting portrait of two sisters; the preteen daughter /niece whose mercurial moods and needs whet their differences; and the ways in which inanimate objects can serve as a silent sounding board for their, and by extension, our unarticulated fears and desires, and as a springboard to help us identify and at last, deal with them.  (more…)

• Man of La Mancha
• Play by Dale Wasserman
• Music by Mitch Leigh . Lyrics by: Joe Darien
• Directed by Colin Hovde
• Musical Direction by Shawn Burke-Storer
• Choreographed by Stefan Sittig
• Produced by Washington Savoyards
• Reviewed by Leslie Weisman

You don’t often get the chance to see a small local company put on a Broadway blockbuster that started life as a black-and-white TV show, inspired by a 16^th-century novel whose cultural legacy still speaks to us in the 21^st.  But for the next few days, you can see it on H Street.

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