DC Theatre Scene

The Mint Theatre is housed in a black box in an office building on West 43^rd Street in New York. It’s not a particularly inviting space, yet it continues  to enrich our seasons by uncovering little known plays, by investigating their histories, and often bringing back plays that failed commercially, connecting them to research that often explains why that happened. [Read more...]

Not many who are around today ever saw the legendary Katharine Cornell on stage, for she retired in 1961. At that time, her husband Guthrie McClintock passed away, and she would not work without him, as he’d directed everything she’d done on the New York stage.  I, however, did catch her act on several occasions, in a revival of Candide which featured Marlon Brando, and in something called That Lady, in which she wore an intriguing eye patch. I saw her, too, in an all-star revival of The Three Sisters, and in Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemna. I have vivid memories of that work, and I can still hear that mellifluous voice in my inner ear.  Cornell did not move so much as float across a  stage. [Read more...]

Send in the clowns – Don’t bother, they’re here.

They are all at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway where they are working overtime to make The Addams Family the laugh riot that it almost is. [Read more...]

The weather was ridiculous. Ten days of blazing sunshine, ten nights of balmy breezes. Not a drop of rain, only puffy white clouds; you’d have thought it was Christmas in  Barbados.  But no, it was Jolly Olde England and I was in London for a feast of theatre. [Read more...]

I’m sorry to say I neglected this Roundabout revival of Tennessee Williams’ first success earlier, because it is closing in several days, and you should know about it.  It opened in very late April  at the off Broadway Laura Pels Theatre and its notices were smashing. Now I add my small voice to those glowing reviews. [Read more...]

This play by Lillian Hellman is rarely revived, and it’s worth making some effort to see this production of it, if Hellman is one of your favorites. It’s not her best play, but it is full of the good story telling for which she was famous, for its craft, for its awareness of what keeps an audience interested for, in this case, almost three hours with intermission. [Read more...]

Lynne Meadow, the Artistic Director of the Manhattan Theatre Club, has brought a London scorcher of a play to its smaller New York venue, the City Center Stage I.  The play is Polly Stenham’s That Face, and it roared into London’s Upstairs theatre at the Royal Court on Shakespeare’s birthday in 2007. [Read more...]

The Brits have done it again.  Out of the Donmar Warehouse in London, a consortium of ten producers have brought to Broadway the import Red, a new play dealing with the working habits, the philosophy, the character of artist Mark Rothko as channeled through actor Alfred Molina, [Read more...]

Adam Rapp is an Obie award winning playwright and director, and he would appear to freelance, for his plays have been done at A.R.T., the Rattlestick Players, The Bush in London, at Playwrights’ Horizons and the Flea. I’ve heard good things about his work, most recently about Red Light Winter, [Read more...]