Seldom as a writer do I get the pleasure of covering an event I enjoy as much as the DC Loves Dilla Benefit Concert. The benefit concert which is in its eighth year honors world renowed rapper and super producer James Dewitt Yancey better known as Jay Dee or J Dilla. Dilla is best known […]
Archives for July 2013
Capital Fringe: Songs from an Unmade Bed
– by guest writer Harv Lester – I routinely search out new cast albums for musical theater shows. I have what I once thought was a very large cast album collection – between 900 and 1,000 cast recordings – until I recently did a show with someone who has three times as many. Even though […]
Capital Fringe: Legal Tender
by guest writers Robert Michael Oliver (director) and Elizabeth Bruce (author) Oliver: I think of this show as a sort of grand experiment. I’ve done poetry in performance before, and this time I really wanted to try prose in performance. When I landed on doing Elizabeth’s fiction, these short little pieces, I thought they were […]
A little Judy. A lot of laughs. We look in on The No Rules Show
A dash of old-time TV variety show, a pinch of late-night talk show, and more than a soupçon of improvisation are the ingredients the guys at No Rules Theatre Company hope will satisfy fun-loving audiences looking for laughs and music.
H2O
This world premiere has a fascinating premise, that performing theater, in this case, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, can help save a wayward soul desperately in need of structure in his life. Partnering this Hamlet with just the Ophelia is the key.
Some Book of Mormon tickets still available
Good news for all the Mormon fans out there who don’t yet have tickets. While it’s true that nearly all the full view seats for the entire run of Book of Mormon at the Kennedy Center sold out in March, a notice has appeared on the Kennedy Center site that some limited-view seats are still […]
Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah
In this strangely titled production that packs a wallop, writer and director Mark St. Germain sets up an imagined encounter between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The world premiere script is remarkably savvy, complete with beats that ebb and flow with a natural ease.
Studio’s Rocky Horror revealed (well, not everything!)
– We talk with Alan Paul, co-director of The Rocky Horror Show, about to open at Studio Theatre’s 2nd Stage – This year marks forty years of pelvic thrusts, cross-dressing aliens, and good old rock and roll that kicks a straight-laced young couple into a time warp of sensual delights and domination. The Rocky Horror […]
Capital Fringe: Married Sex
– by guest writer Laura Zam – For several years, I had been wanting to write a comedy about the long-term effects of my own childhood sexual abuse. I know, this subject is a riot! But that’s what I do: I write comedies about horrible subject matter. I do this not to trivialize, but to […]
Capital Fringe: dog & pony dc’s A Killing Game
– by guest writer Colin K. Bills – dog & pony dc’s A Killing Game (or AKG) is an absurdist-play-meets-party-game promising the most fun you’ll ever have dying. The show, and the game within it, begins with the outbreak of a deadly disease wherein EVERYONE – the performers and the audience – dies. Led by […]
Slings and Arrows: Season 1:04 Outrageous Fortune
May: “Geoffrey just fired Darren.” Anna: “Oh God. I have such mixed feelings about that.”
Modern Terrorism, or They Who Want to Kill Us and How We Learn to Love Them
Terrorism. Not typically the topic that makes you want to have a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants. However, terrorists are the subject of Jon Kern’s horribly funny play Extreme Terrorism, inappropriately enough, one of the bright spots in this year’s American Contemporary Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.