If you are looking for a crowd pleaser to open your theatre’s season, a fine farce like Don’t Dress for Dinner is an excellent choice. 1st Stage launches its new year with an enjoyable production of a famous French classic work from the late Marc Camoletti, best known as the author of the recent successful […]
Archives for September 13, 2011
Knickerbocker Holiday – Concert reading
Some musicals become identified with a single hit song from their scores. The downside of that is that such fame or notoriety can keep us from discovering the pleasures of the rest of the score.
Tosca
Opening night of the Washington National Opera celebrated both a new leader at the helm and a new partnership with The Kennedy Center. Like a marriage ceremony, there is now a commitment on both sides to make this relationship work and contribute to the thriving of both parties. Showing up Saturday night were Washington’s well-heeled […]
Follies
Sondheim’s Follies is back on Broadway, and in this time of earthquakes, hurricanes and political chaos, that’s a good thing. Set in 1971, for two and a half hours it permits us escape into the complicated psychological landscape of four very average folks, two of whom graced the stage as chorus girls in an imagined […]
The Hollow
Who is that boogeyman scaring the gullible and accommodating? Is it the headless Hessian wreaking terror on the residents of Sleepy Hollow, immortalized in Washington Irving’s classic 1820 tale, or playwright Hunter Foster through his world premiere musical The Hollow, at Arlington’s Signature Theatre?
A Raisin in the Sun
A Raisin in the Sun was groundbreaking in 1959 and is heartbreaking in 2011. Lorraine Hansberry’s play about a working class black family in Chicago chasing middle class dreams is vivid, vital and fiercely wrought more than 50 years later in an eloquent and robust production at Everyman Theatre.
The Boy Detective Fails
Who would’ve bet that a musical, by turns wacky and heartfelt, guided by a suicidal narrator struggling with his sanity—himself a metafictional send-up of anachronistic boys’ detective fiction—populated by cartoon characters and plotted as an unsolved murder mystery while actually a poignant survivors’ tale of healing, would work? Signature Theatre took the bet and it […]