You are here: Home / Archives for Steve Hallex

All posts by Steve Hallex:

Steve Hallex is an entertainment writer, who joins us covering the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival.

Oxygen

May 11, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Russian playwright Ivan Vyrypaev, whose play Oxygen is being produced by Taffety Punk, is a proponent of the experimental school of New Drama where plot and character are no longer the basis of drama. New Drama playwrights often interview subjects and use their words verbatim as dialogue, attempting to knit a semblance of character from the words with the action happening not on stage, but in recollection. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Hamlecchino: Clown Prince of Denmark

April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Don’t take this the wrong way, but Hamlet has always been difficult for me.  Yeah, there are more than a few who say it’s Shakespeare’s greatest play (though the older you get, the more you appreciate King Lear).  But, to me, the Danish Play is too ponderous for its own good.  George Bernard Shaw — in praising Ibsen’s bringing realism to the stage—once remarked that very few people have had an uncle murder their father, then marry their mother.  Well, maybe not very few.  Less than half, though, right? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Pinky Swear’s Killing Women

April 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Producer/ stars Allyson Harkey and Karen Lange, in their newest production for Pinky Swear—Marisa Wegryzn’s Killing Women— present a play about the big women’s issues of our day.  In particular, the work/ family struggle, and the pitfalls of women in a male-dominated profession.  Only here, that profession happens to be professional killing.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

The Complete and Condensed Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Volume 1: Early Plays/ Lost Plays

April 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Who knew there was such a lode of priceless, unheralded Eugene O’ Neill material out there, and just under our noses?  The New York Neo-Futurists found it by digging in a place some of us are kicking ourselves for not thinking of. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Studio 3′s children’s show, Home

April 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

Artistic director Caren Hearne was all bubbles and shine as she introduced Studio 3 Theatre for Young Audiences’ production of Lizzie Allen’s Home to a Saturday afternoon crowd at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton.  Studio 3, she announced, is the only theater in this country producing the English playwright’s work. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

The Nightmare Dreamer

March 20, 2012 By 4 Comments

On Friday, March 16th, a company called Tattooed Potato showed its first public face at Flashpoint.  Although they are not there yet, this group could easily evolve into yet another iconic local troupe.  Their style is incipient, but distinctive.  Watch for them. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

From Shuffle to Showboat

February 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

I want you to imagine it is 1927; the week after Christmas.  You have bought your tickets, and now your chilly bones sit in a dark corner of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Theater in New York.  The billed show is Show Boat by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II.  But it isn’t starting; it has already begun.  You’ve heard the overture by now, and seen all the major characters; a few musical numbers have gone by as Act I has stretched out like a smooth legato.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Les Justes

February 16, 2012 By 1 Comment

If you think furs, Fabergé eggs, ballet when you think about 20th century Russia, Les Justes is here to remind you that for every lithographed Russian noblewoman traipsing around St. Petersburg in the latest Parisian fashions, there were hundreds of thousands of unseen serfs living on moss and wild roots in the countryside. For most Russians, life was spent in slums, sustenance farms, and purgatory prisons.  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Almost, Maine

February 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Welcome to winter wonderland, presented by 1st Stage.  If you’ve been to this theater, things will seem a little different this time.  The arena-like seating is curtained off for the performance, and chairs are placed in the round on the stage itself.  Getting to your seats will be tricky with very strict no-walking-on-the-stage’s-set rules in place.  Seated, you just might feel a chill, with much of the stage covered in theatrical snow, with more to follow as the play progresses.  As you wait for the actors to take the stage, chilly music, reminiscent of George Winston’s album “December” plays on the sound system. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:

Devil Boys from Beyond

February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Landless Theatre is at it again.  Yes, the company that brings you inane post-modern theatre, has hit another one: Devil Boys from Beyond, premiering this February, and though it’s a triple to the right field wall rather than a grand slam, it’s still worthy of a trip to Adams-Morgan. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Our Reviews Tagged With:
« Older Posts