“It was a brave man,” Jonathan Swift once observed, “who first et an oyster.”

Douglas Carter Beane is a brave man, and for much the same reason. He took Xanadu, a 1980’s flop-o movie musical – the one which ended the brief movie-star career of Australian songbird Olivia Newton-John—and audaciously turned it into a play. A hit play. A big, freaking, Broadway-style hit play, that ran for a year and a half. [Read more...]

God of Carnage feels like a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for the 21^st century.  The characters are better dressed, finer housed, super toned, and a whole lot funnier. But playwright Yasmina Reza argues that the same god still reigns, and that under the surface we are still primitives.  Scratch us and we don’t bleed, we begin to hurl things at each other. The new production at Signature Theatre makes us yelp in recognition through our laughter. [Read more...]

Sunday evening, Arlington’s Signature Theatre revealed the world premiere of Brother Russia, a new rock musical by the creative team of John Dempsey and Dana Rowe. Chock full of interesting characters and loaded with catchy music, Brother Russia is top-notch musical theater—until its wordy, misconceived final moments bring the show back down to earth with a resounding thud. [Read more...]

If plays are judged by the sheer force of their emotional impact, Really Really – the world premiere of playwright Paul Colaizzo’s contemporary, college-set drama, now playing at Signature Theatre – is an unvarnished success. This is a play of such raw intensity that you’ll be afraid to blink for fear of missing something. [Read more...]

At its core, romance is the same at any age: an exciting, gut-wrenching roller coaster of blessed highs and crushing lows. The only thing that changes as the years go by is the volume of emotional baggage standing in the way of new love and contentment. In A Second Chance, Ted Shen’s elegant ode to late-blooming love, two New York City residents grapple with personal demons and painful pasts as they try to open their hearts one more time. [Read more...]