If you like country music, bluegrass, lowdown rock and lots of gospel, you’ll find yourself moved by Jeanine Tesori’s score which was first heard off Broadway in 1997 in a well received Manhattan Theatre Club production that found critical favor. Based on a story by Doris Betts, the musical has a book and lyrics by […]
Archives for May 2014
Things You Shouldn’t Say Past Midnight
So what do you scream out in the throes of ecstasy? Should a person get a freedom-to-express pass even when the turn-on becomes racially or otherwise offensive? Is nasty necessarily exciting? Keegan’s new play asks us to take a look at our most secret desires, and, as it spills out intimate details about bedroom mores, […]
Show scores by Dianna Ross and other top pop and jazz artists
One vocal treatment of a Styne score that has been laying under the wraps of near obscurity for 45 years has just re-emerged in a digital re-release of note:”Diana Ross and the Supremes Sing & Perform Funny Girl.” In 1968, when Motown’s Berry Gordy was beginning to groom Ms. Ross for single stardom, he brought her into a studio in New York City for a two day recording session to lay down the lead vocals for a ten-track album of songs from the score that belongs so demonstrably to Barbra Streisand.
The Vaclav Havel Project: Vanek Unleashed and Unveiling
Alliance for New Music-Theatre’s spirited, quirky The Vaclav Havel Project offers delightful commentary on the perennial question of the artist’s role in society. When that artist is former Czech president and Communist-era dissident Vaclav Havel – or a representation of him – the question takes on greater geo-political significance.
Taffety Punk’s Charm, Thoroughly – Yep – Charming
It isn’t hard to find live theater in Washington, DC. The nation’s capital is a theater town, after all – and if that’s news to you, then I might suggest a quick visit to the Internet to see what you uncover (start with DC Theater Scene, of course). What’s harder is finding great theater, and […]
Nero/Pseudo
The stomping ground for Capital Fringe fanatics does not lie dormant this spring: Through June 1, WSC Avant Bard is rocking the Shop at Fort Fringe with an adventurous offering that exemplifies the company’s signature blend of high- and low-brow theatre inspired by the classics.
Light of Night
H.L. Mencken famously observed that the role of a journalist is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Sometimes a playwright can fill a similar role. Cecilia Copeland’s fantastical domestic drama Light of Night at Venus Theatre at times is genuinely uncomfortable for the audience in the best senses of the word, but overall […]
Tango Turco (Turkish Tango)
There’s an old adage, “What goes around comes around,” that’s apt for Argentine playwright Rafael Bruza’s play. But you have to give yourself up and really believe in what you are seeing enacted before you.
Smokey Joe’s Café a sensation at Arena Stage
A highly stylized, spirited musical revue that shimmies through the (popular and some not-so-popular) songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Smokey Joe’s Café triumphs—from its superb cast down to all the fedoras and a couple of well-placed pairs of saddle shoes. No detail is missed.
Bloody Poetry, startling and superb
Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s “Rulebreaker Rep” — directed with a clear vision by Lise Bruneau — focuses on rebellious and freethinking writers throughout history. It questions the meaning and obligations that come from claiming the word “artist.” Is the artistic lifestyle harming society or is society hindering the artistic lifestyle?
Synetic’s Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog)
Arlington’s Synetic Theater, showered with superlatives for its moody goth fantasias and wordless “Silent Shakespeare” series, is tentatively emerging from its comfort zone in concluding its 2013/14 season with a new trick: A chatty adaptation of Victorian humorist Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To say nothing of the Dog). The result is […]
Zeitgeist DC takes actor/audience involvement to a whole new level
If the Zeitgeist Festival is truly an indicator of the current global evolution of theater, than I’m happy to say this industry is as strange, wonderful, bizarre, rough, frustrating, intimate and exciting as one could hope.