In her life in the theater, Randy Danson has played a roll call of outsized women. Think of them: Clytemnestra in The Oresteia, Agave in The Bacchae, Mae Garga in In the Jungle of the Cities, Phaedra, Ahab’s Wife, Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, the Duchess of Malfi, Arkedina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, , Masha in The Three Sisters, Dr. Vivian Bearing in Wit, Lady Macbeth and, of course, Shen Ta/Shui Ta in The Good Person of Szechuan. [Read more...]
Nat ‘King’ Cole director Lou Bellamy
June 11, 2011 By 2 Comments
Lou Bellamy on Nat ‘King’ Cole, August Wilson and his company Penumbra Theatre
Director Lou Bellamy is back in Washington, and we had the chance to talk with him about, among other things, the great Nat ‘King’ Cole, because his Penumbra Theatre Company’s production of I Wish You Love has just opened at the Kennedy Center. [Read more...]
Being the audience – life experienced all together
April 22, 2011 By 2 Comments
A meditation on what it means to be an audience member
A while back, at the opening of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at Arena Stage, there was a reference, by George, Martha’s history professor husband, to something going back to the Punic Wars.
It was a caustic, satiric, reference, as I remember, and I laughed. So did a lot of other people in the audience. It made me feel good that so many people got the joke, knew what the Punic Wars might have been besides very old. On the other hand, I felt less smug about knowing it. [Read more...]
Michael Bobbitt’s Excellent Adventure
March 3, 2011 By 4 Comments
An interview with director/writer/choreographer and Artistic Director of Adventure Theatre Michael J. Bobbitt
Michael J. Bobbitt is a dreamer and he dreams not impossible but big, good, do-able dreams. Bobbitt is no pie-in-the sky kind of dreamer. He’s the kind that makes dreams happen. [Read more...]
Philip Goodwin on playing Kenneth Tynan
February 6, 2011 By 1 Comment
Philip Goodwin may be from Maine, he may live in New York, and have trained in England, but around here, he’s a Washington actor.
Goodwin feels the pull himself. “I have some of that New England reserve, I supposed, and I was cast in Shakespeare plays a lot because of my training, and I live New York, which I love, but sometimes, this is like home to me, a second home, but home.” [Read more...]
Joe Banno
January 21, 2011 By 6 Comments
Washington is full of hidden treasures, especially when it comes to culture and entertainment. You know – the concerts at many of the city’s museums and cultural institutions, from the National Gallery of Arts concerts, to the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center to the Tuesday performances at the Church of the Epiphany. Things like out of the way galleries, or museums, like the Kreeger on Foxhall Road, or the National Arboretum, or the sloths at the zoo.
We have hidden people treasures, too – musicians and rock bands that have been not only reliable but often inspired. We have actors that so far have not been mentioned once on Access Hollywood, but nevertheless routinely do brilliant work at venues large and small throughout the DC area. We have writers and critics whose names are rarely on anyone’s lips. (Sigh) And we have Joe Banno. [Read more...]
Anna Deavere Smith
January 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Back in the 1990s, when I first saw Fires in the Mirror, a play about a conflict in which African Americans and Orthodox Jews battled in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I wanted to meet Anna Deavere Smith.
That play was amazing, it broke new ground and introduced like a mini-explosion a talented, gifted, completely unfazed-by-anything playwright-actress, a do-everything, want-to-know-everything kind of woman. Smith played all the parts—community activists, some of them familiar in the headlines, rabbis, students, neighborhood angry young men, the victims, the agitators, the angry citizens and residents of a place where two very different cultures collided. [Read more...]
Backstage with The Nutcracker
December 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Backstage after their performance, the actors, still exhilarated and buzzed, talk about the show, and the children in the audience. The puppets, for a few hours, are once again still and waiting.
Veronica del Cerro, who plays Clara, the young girl who goes on a magical journey in The Puppet Company’s production of The Nutcracker laughed, remembering a child’s reaction from a previous performance. “This one little girl was just shocked to find out I wasn’t really Clara,” she said. “When I took off the mask, they were so startled. She said Clara was prettier.” [Read more...]
Welcome back, Cherry Red
December 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Now that Cherry Red Productions is back on the boards in Washington with a production of Justin Tanner’s Wife Swappers, (at the DC Arts Center in Adams Morgan), everyone seems to be having sweaty flashbacks to the CR good old days. [Read more...]
Lauren Molina and Geoff Packard
December 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Catching up with two of the stars from Candide
Over the years, you see a lot of them, and sometimes you wonder.
You know, the backup singer, the understudy, the impossibly young and good looking men and women, singing, dancing, mike in hand, hoofing like mad, handsome lads, pretty girls who always look like they just belong up there, doing what they do, they’re in your ticket stubs, in the curtain’s texture, in the echoes of songs just sung, they’ve got so much energy they leave you a little breathless and please you. [Read more...]
