How light is the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Alan Ayckbourn musical now playing at 1^st Stage? Imagine a chiffon pie, covered with whipped cream and meringue. It is lighter than that. Imagine a field of chipmunks floating on helium balloons. It is lighter than that. Imagine The Unbearable Lightness of Being, made not only bearable but turned into a gigglefest. It is lighter than that. [Read more...]

The Tennessee Williams Centennial Festival has closed, but 1st Stage’s sensitive and skilled rendition of The Glass Menagerie allows us to revel in the talent of the great Tennessee Williams once again. [Read more...]

Life is already chaotic and amusing enough when your life is somewhat normal.  Add in a peculiar twist and your day can really take a left turn into the Twilight Zone.  “Good morning.  How are you?  How would you like to get dressed.  You really like this dress.  Would you like to have some breakfast?”  “Yes, thank you.  Oh, what an awful dress.  Do I really like this dress?  By the way, who are you?  And…who am I?”  How would you like it if your day started this way?  What if every day started this way? [Read more...]

Can an Agatha Christie mystery still be interesting if you already know who did it?  Thanks to a talented cast and a polished production from 1st Stage, the answer is a solid “Yes.” [Read more...]

Hard-working corporate lawyer Johnny Case wants to use an eminent business score to “retire early and work late” so he can experience life.  This plan is a surprise to his heiress fiancée, a delight to her rebellious sister, and an anathema to her wealthy banker father.  Such is the plot behind Philip Barry’s Holiday, a classic theatrical chestnut that receives a pleasant but understated production from 1st Stage. [Read more...]

“I’m so glad nobody was killed,” an audience member, walking past me, remarked to a companion.

Well, of course, murder was on the table. We’re talking about stamp collecting, aren’t we?

Mauritius is a love story – a story about love of stamps, and love of money, and other, mostly doomed, love drifting mysteriously through a half-told backstory. [Read more...]

“When I think about things I don’t understand, I get depressed,” says dimbulb R.J. (Ryan Tumulty) in Risk Everything, the better of the two George F. Walker one-acts now being produced by 1^st Stage. R.J. gets depressed a lot. But for the rest of us, in a context where truth is as elusive as quicksilver, the primary sensation is elation. [Read more...]

Tell me if you think this is funny: A young man is called home from his studies upon the sudden death of his father. Arriving, he discovers his mother in the arms of a local vulgarian, [Read more...]

According to the Washington Post’s Jane Horwitz, when  1^st Stage Artistic Director Mark Krikstan heard that his company had won the Helen Hayes John Aniello Award for Outstanding Emerging Theatre Company, he hung up and said “… Oh no. Now I’ve got to make sure this show is good.”

He needn’t have worried. The show is good. [Read more...]

The ambitious young company at 1^st Stage has had a run of successful productions, but the law of inevitability may have caught up with them with this production of the classic swashbuckler The Prisoner of Zenda. [Read more...]