If you’re like me, you find it easy to justify an eighty-mile trip to see a hot actor – one never seen on Washington stages – play a classic role in a great play. So for that reason, I hied myself hence to Fredrick yesterday in order to see Jeff Keilholtz take on the role […]
Archives for November 2011
The Boys from Syracuse
Usually, I am not one for concert opera or musicals, but the concert-style staging this weekend of Boys from Syracuse by Rodgers and Hart at the Shakespeare Theatre Company is a delight. The pre-production materials all announced that this would be a scripts-in-hand event, but we the audience, like most of the performers on stage, soon forgot […]
Howard Shalwitz on growing up the Woolly way
Turning 30. A time to look back, take stock, grow up. Or reinvent a theater. When Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company hit the big 3-0 two years ago, artistic director Howard Shalwitz viewed the occasion as not just a reason to party and bust a move, but to bust out of the box.
Anne and Emmett
The world premiere of Anne & Emmett has a remarkable lightness about it, which is striking considering the horrendous material covered and the brutality inflicted on two young innocents.
After the Fall
Some memories waft into view from a lazy distance. Others brew slowly in the back of the mind. No such luck for Quentin, whose trip down memory lane isn’t so much a stroll as a triathlon, elbowed from all sides by the family, friends, and lovers of days gone by. If he runs off track […]
Coraje II / Courage II
We could all be going through airport security instead of being ushered onto a black box stage where we are about to become part of an art-making process. “Please come in. Leave your belongings on the seats. You can leave your keys, your purses. It’s a secure zone…. Put your cell phones on silent mode, […]
Is Shakespeare Shakespeare?
“Anonymous” says ‘no’. Freud agrees. Who are we to believe? Court is in session and Tim Treanor argues his case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let’s review the evidence. Can anyone reasonably believe that this man is responsible for some of the greatest literature in the English language? He was a rustic, indifferently educated, […]
Olney Theatre Center to say goodbye to Jim Petosa
Jim Petosa, who has served Olney Theatre as its artistic director since 1993, will step down at the end of 2012, the company announced today.
Boys from Syracuse concert gets full production treatment at STC
Shakespeare Theatre Company turns 25 this year, and to celebrate, they’re turning Sidney Harman Hall into a Broadway concert hall for The Bard’s Broadway: The Boys from Syracuse, for 5 performances this weekend, November 4 – 6.
Derek Goldman’s new play re-imagines ‘Night of the Hunter’
Few films occupy as strange a corner of the cinematic landscape as Charles Laughton’s 1955 classic “The Night Of The Hunter.” A nightmarish mix of American folklore and German expressionism, the movie — concerning two young children on the run from a homicidal preacher who seeks to murder them and pocket their father’s money — […]
La Cage Aux Folles
You’d kill for those shoes. And those legs. That’s your initial impression of the touring production of the Tony Award winning 2010 Broadway revival of La Cage Aux Folles.
Keeping the ‘art’ in artistic directing, and the ticket prices low
What can two DC artistic directors – separated by more than twenty years of producing experience – learn from one another? Long time producer, Martin Blank of American Ensemble Theater and Jason Schlafstein, Co-Founder of the fledgling Flying V sit down with one another to find out.