Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, a mystery play set in an economically deteriorating small town, has won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Pulitzer Committee announced yesterday.
Archives for April 2017
Quotidian’s production proves it’s time for Doubt (review)
You have likely encountered Doubt: A Parable before. Whether it be through the Tony Award-winning original Broadway production, the Pulitzer Prize-winning script, the Academy Award-nominated film or the multitude of well-received regional productions (including several in the DC Metro area), John Patrick Shanley’s meditation on the power of doubt vs. conviction has been in the collective […]
Studio Theatre announces 7 of the 9 plays from its upcoming season
Qui Nguyen’s (Living Dead in Denmark) Steinberg Award-winning play Vietgone will highlight Studio Theatre’s 2017-2018, according to a partial season schedule released by the company.
Brave Spirits gives A King and No King its debut after 400 years (review)
It took over 400 years for A King and No King to receive a DC area premiere. Yet were authors Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher still alive, they would certainly be pleased with the Brave Spirits Theatre’s fine production of their tragicomedy about a king’s attraction to his sister.
Mosaic gives voice to Africa now with A Human Being Died That Night (review)
Mosaic Theater Company is only in its second year of producing but, planting itself firmly on Washington’s H Street corridor in northeast Washington, the team of Ari Roth and Serge Seiden has already made a name for the production company by putting on provocative dramatic writing that raises important social and political dialogue.
Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs at Theater J (review)
You think you’ve got problems? Try being a too-smart-for-his-own-good Jewish kid in Brooklyn in 1937. Neil Simon’s largely autobiographical comedy follows his alter ego Eugene (Cole Sitilides) as he navigates puberty, his family and the faraway events of the world, which turn out to be not so very far away after all.
A Raisin in the Sun at Arena Stage (review)
Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking portrayal of a black working-class family and its “dream deferred” in mid-20th century America maintains its timeless grace in a new revival at Arena Stage, but disappointingly, many of the performances don’t fulfill their roles’ potential.
“Champion” Librettist Wins $25,000 Steinberg/ATCA Award for play about boxer Emile Griffith
Michael Cristofer, who wrote the libretto for the opera Champion, seen at Washington National Opera earlier this year, mined the same territory to write Man in the Ring, which debuted in Chicago last September. The American Theatre Critics Association yesterday announced that his efforts have earned him the $25,000 Harold and Mimi Steinberg/American Theatre Critics […]
GALA’s version of In the Heights has never been seen in the U.S. Hugo Medrano tells us more.
GALA Hispanic Theater is getting ready to open Lin-Manuel Miranda/Quiara Alegría Hudes’ Tony Award winning musical In the Heights about a Dominican family in Washington Heights. What makes this production so special is that it will be the first time U.S. audiences will have a chance to hear In the Heights in Spanish. In doing that, GALA will also premiere their […]
King Lear from Lean & Hungry Theater (review)
For this special fully staged production after ten years of radio dramas, Lean & Hungry Theater sure picked a doozy. Lear isn’t for the faint of heart. For one, the notorious and gruesome eye gouging is one of the most sickening sequences that I’ll never get used to. Then there’s the unending treachery among one’s closest cadre […]
Review of Present Laughter. Kevin Kline’s back but Coward’s comedy feels a bit musty
After a decade’s absence from Broadway, Kevin Kline returns as the aging matinee idol in Present Laughter. Kline, the swashbuckler of Pirates of Penzance and the hunk of On The Twentieth Century, would be welcome back in almost any theatrical vehicle. Yet this sixth Broadway production of Noël Coward’s 1939 comedy doesn’t add up to […]
‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore by Brave Spirits (review)
The human heart: such a powerful muscle, and such a delicate instrument at the same time. The frailties of the human heart, especially when twisted with desire, can make for dangerous congress.