The Stage Guild is back!  And in full form as if they never skipped a beat.  After a two-year hiatus, the Washington Stage Guild has returned and mounts Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime with a fun-filled swagger that would do Oscar Wilde proud. [Read more...]

Traditionally, the Washington Stage Guild doing a successful production of Shaw is as close to a sure bet as the local theatre scene offers. Happily, the company’s latest production of two one-acts collectively titled Strange Bedfellows continues their winning streak. [Read more...]

By Michael Hollinger

Produced by Washington Stage Guild

Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

Early on in Michael Hollinger’s Opus, string quartet music is compared to love making and "a discourse among four reasonable people."  Beautifully acted and staged at the Washington Stage Guild, director Steven Carpenter establishes the right tone for the interlock of a witty duel from brilliant talk that resonates like shared notes and overlapping phrases of music. 

Off-stage, you would expect the select four "to complete sentences for each other," if they must perform together "like four instruments with one bow." Not so. Ultimately, the playwright’s seamless dialogue builds to a moment of delicious discord that transcends into titillating theater. On opening night, the audience seemed to take a breath with each rest in the well-timed interplay until the last tense moment.

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By George Bernard Shaw

Produced by Washington Stage Guild

Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

Kathleen Akerly in Dark Lady of the Sonnets (Photo: C.Stanley Photography)

Three one-acts by George Bernard Shaw in one evening? What’s impressive is the way the Washington Stage Guild’s adroit actors deliver these plays in two and a half hours. Shaw’s Shorts: The Man of Destiny (1896), O’Flaherty, V.C. (1915) and The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (1910), give you anti-war themes and hope for mankind in an evening of fun at the expense of anything sacred.

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Produced by The American Century Theater

Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

Parker Dixon (left) Susan Marie Rhea (center), Kevin Adams (right)  (Photo: Jeffrey Bell)

   The American Century Theater (TACT) can be commended for producing revivals of rarely performed, American masterpieces like Desire Under the Elms from Nobel Laureate playwright Eugene O’Neill in a compelling and beautiful way. Judging from the staging at the Gunston Theatre II in Arlington, TACT’s mission is not impossible. [Read more...]

Produced by Washington Stage Guild

Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

  Jason Stiles and Sunshine Cappelitti  (photo: C. Stanley Photography)

   As the Washington Stage Guild director Bill Largess observes in The Countess  program, the scandal of the 19^th Century would make news in our supermarket tabloids today.In 1853, John Ruskin, a great writer who clarified and defined the Victorian Age, publicly defended the avant-garde, pre-Raphaelite artists for freeing the art world from the Royal Academy’s rigid rules. Appearances were deceiving. At home as a husband, he was prim and arid, a neurotic mess. But he blamed his "mentally unbalanced" wife, Euphemia, a.k.a. Effie, for the strife. "You’re not what I think a woman should be." He wanted a marble Venus or a painting of a Renaissance saint, an ideal. No twenty-first century woman would put up with such a pompous, suffocating prig. Neither did Effie. She ran off with Ruskin’s protégé, the pre-Raphaelite painter, John Millais. Queen Victoria banned Effie, who was not exactly a Princess Di, from existence over their divorce.

   As a play, The Countess is a dazzling, wonderfully ironic little gem. The cast in this well-paced production is superb. Debuting at the Washington Stage Guild, Sunshine Cappelletti (Effie),   nicknamed "the countess", positively glows with incandescent rebellion. Effie is really a gorgeous and rebellious Ophelia. Physically, it’s as if Cappelletti stepped out of a John Millais painting of that title, hanging on the Ruskin parlor wall. [Read more...]

 An Inspector Calls

by J.B. Priestley

Produced by Washington Stage Guild

Reviewed by Tim Treanor

Oh, how I wish I had liked An Inspector Calls.  Washington Stage Guild’s assiduous attention to this sixty-year-old play’s period detail is an act of nobility.  William Pucilowsky’s costumes are gorgeous, and make us long for the era when men could wear tuxedoes, tails and frock coats with the same insouciant grace with which we wear Dockers today.  Marcus Danley’s sturdy set, Marianne Meadows’ subtle lighting, and especially Clay Teunis’ spot-on sound strive mightily, and with great success, to wipe away the wisps of the twenty-first century outside, and to plunge us into the luxurious 1912 dining room of an English clothing magnate and magistrate.  The actors deliver what they can from the material, and John-Michael MacDonald in particular renders an agitated young boozehound with great intelligence and vitality.  These folks all deserve to be involved with great theater. [Read more...]