Musician Tom Teasley’s percussive talents will orchestrate two shows for Constellation in 2015-2016, but Tom will undoubtedly be sitting out both Equus (Jan 14 – Feb 14) and the show which landed Constellation in this ‘Noticeable Departures’ piece – the company will be producing Avenue Q. (Oct 22 – Nov 23).
Archives for April 2015
Airline Highway Broadway Review: Lisa D’Amour’s community of misfits in a New Orleans motel
Airline Highway, Lisa D’Amour’s loving look at the makeshift family of misfits that hang out at a seedy motel along the old Airline Highway in New Orleans, is not a musical, but it is full of music. The characters often break out into song — and the play itself seems a lesson in jazz.
The Visit Broadway Review: Chita Rivera in Kander and Ebb’s grotesque parable of revenge
When the wealthiest woman in the world returns to her bankrupt hometown in The Visit, reactions range from “Her dress, her jewels…like a great film star!” to “half-Jewish, half-gypsy, 100% illegitimate: All her money won’t erase those stains” to “She’s come back to save us.”
Uncle Vanya at Round House: one for Chekhov (review)
With several Vanyas to choose from this spring, Round House Theatre is celebrating its take on the Chekhov classic as one of the more authentic — a version of Uncle Vanya that would make the playwright happy.
Something Rotten Broadway Review: Shakespeare’s rivals create the first musical
There is a musical number early in Something Rotten that thoroughly delivers what the show’s title, cast, creative team, and poster art have promised — Monty Python subversive silliness; Mel Brooks coarse, extravagant entertainment; Forbidden Broadway parody. A desperate Elizabethan playwright named Nick Bottom (Brian d’Arcy James) wants to triumph over his rival, Shakespeare (Christian […]
There is Nothing Like a Dame, Edna (Review of her Glorious Goodbye)
“You couldn’t write that,” said the guy in the seat next to me at Tuesday night’s opening of Dame Edna’s Glorious Goodbye: The Farewell Tour, in town for a week (closing April 26th) at the National Theatre.
Doctor Zhivago Broadway Review: A Soapy Romance During the Russian Revolution
I had hoped that a major benefit of winning the Cold War would be no longer having to sit through a show like Doctor Zhivago, a musical adaptation of Pasternak’s novel that presents the Russian Revolution largely as the story of a good-looking couple’s long-simmering adulterous affair and the mean Communists who get in their […]
Review: Olney Theatre’s Carousel, dazzling
The 70th anniversary of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel finds the musical in radiant fettle, thanks to a vital and deeply moving production at Olney Theatre Center under the direction of Jason Loewith.
Stephen Adly Guirgis wins Pulitzer for Drama
This year’s Pulitzer Prize for Drama will be awarded to Stephen Adly Guirgis for Between Riverside and Crazy, his dark comedy about a retired police officer whose landlords are trying to remove him from a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan. Premiered in 2014 at the Atlantic Theater Company, directed by Austin Pendleton and starring Stephen McKinley […]
Studio’s Murder Ballad rocks the cabaret experience (review)
Studio Theatre Artistic Director David Muse’s inspiration to “bring the 14th street nightlife” onto the stage and immerse its audience in a rock musical cabaret experience pays off big, making up for the weaknesses in the material itself.
GALA review: Mariela in the Desert / Mariela en el desierto
Women who behave rarely make great artists. Local D.C. playwright Karen Zacarías and a well-polished GALA Hispanic Theatre cast and technical team present us with a strange, tragic-comic masterpiece that introduces us to outsiders living in the desert, where characters are up against vast open spaces and nothingness. This is a complex play about the […]
The King and I Broadway Review: A ravishing revival starring Kelli O’Hara, Ken Watanabe
From the very first moments of Lincoln Center’s ravishing The King and I, it feels like a privilege just to be sitting in the audience. First the 29 musicians play Rodgers and Hammerstein’s lush overture in an orchestra pit that looks to be in the middle of the auditorium. Then suddenly a magnificent ship slides […]