Folger Theatre’s season announcement today brings to six the number of theatres revealing their 2015-2016 shows in the past week. Slowly the upcoming season is coming into focus and what we’ve seen so far is a robust twelve months of theatregoing with most companies continuing or expanding selections and very few cutting back the number […]
Archives for May 2015
No Rules’ Sketch show, totally absurd (review)
Sketch show is funny when No Rules does it. The most admirable thing about sketch comedy as an art form is this – it just gets itself out there. You have an idea? Write it down, punch up the jokes, and get it on stage or on film. Take too much time to polish it […]
Mary Magdalene, The Woman Erased, part of Teatro’s Magical Equador Festival
Controversy swirls around the biblical woman Mary Magdalene. Was she the wife of Jesus? Or was she merely a repentant prostitute, showing us how a sinner can be redeemed by following Jesus? Or was she both sinner and saint?
Jacqueline E. Lawton: adapting Wizard of Oz and what’s next
After a performance of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that my family attended, my daughter walked into the lobby where the actors were waiting to greet the audience. She walked up to one of them and embraced her. Sure, in my book, that is about the best review the show could get. The actual press […]
Shakespeare-appointed Supreme Court rules on the insanity of impossible dreams
So you run your lance full-bore at windmills, recruit a barber in your fight against the muleteers, believe a local prostitute to be your damsel of grace, and then fall into a coma. Should someone be appointed to take care of you? What will the Supreme Mock Court – the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s traditional gathering […]
The explosive Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek. Possibly Fugard’s last look at South Africa (review)
In what he says may be his last play, South African playwright Athol Fugard explores his characters’ fear, humiliation and desperation, as he has in such well-known anti-apartheid works as Blood Knot and MASTER HAROLD … and the Boys. But this time, a white woman, post apartheid, shares those emotions.
Rossini’s Cinderella at The Kennedy Center (review)
Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera, La Cenerentola, here titled Cinderella, is full of vibrantly-colored costumes, wild wigs, a thrilling gallop of a score, charming voices, and delightfully cavorting mice – well, giant-sized rats – but is it funny and family friendly? Stage Director Joan Font has indeed pulled out all the stops in choreographed scenes and […]
Smash favorite Wesley Taylor leads Signature’s Cabaret as The Emcee
While the TV show Smash may not have lived up to its name in the ratings department, the ambitious NBC show about the trials and tribulations of putting on a Broadway musical captured millions of viewers and brought many theater actors a legion of fans away from the Great White Way.
Rob Jansen dons Chaplin’s bowler for The Tramp’s New World
Who wouldn’t want to see a lost Charlie Chaplin film? The Tramp’s New World was a screenplay for The Tramp by James Agee which Chaplin declined to produce because he felt, at the time (1949), that the character no longer spoke to audiences and silent film was outdated. While his refusal is our eternal loss, […]
Birth of a nation: 1776 at Toby’s Dinner Theatre (review)
The founding fathers are looking spry and lively at Toby’s Dinner Theatre in Columbia right now as they once again fight for independence in the musical 1776. It’s a masterpiece, I say, and I cheered every word and every letter. I hope you will feel that way, too.
Janet Langhart Cohen and Anne & Emmett. What we don’t want to talk about
A new production of Janet Langhart Cohen’s Anne & Emmett will be presented this weekend at MetroStage. I talked to Ms. Cohen recently to find out more about her background and why she chose to write this play about Anne Frank and Emmett Till. Janet Langhart Cohen was at a gathering when a woman questioned […]
Marley star Saycon Sengbloh on playing Rita Marley
Saycon Sengbloh is a huge Bob Marley fan. As a child, she listened to his music all the time, read books about his life and saw numerous documentaries about the Reggae giant. So, when she heard that there was a Baltimore casting call for a new musical about his life, the New York-based actress knew […]