Miche Braden is the biggest force of nature this side of Hurricane Harvey. She personifies the “Empress of the Blues” Bessie Smith with a powerful voice, enormous talent, a powerful stage presence, and a big heart. As a result, The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith provides a fabulous kickoff to Mosaic Theater […]
Archives for August 2017
Howard Shalwitz on why the time is right for Woolly to produce The Arsonists
Susan Galbraith and Howard Shalwitz, longtime friends and colleagues, talk about Howard’s return to the stage for The Arsonists as he prepares to depart from the company he co-founded in 1980.
Signature’s A Little Night Music – sophisticated, stylish and sexy (review)
Signature Theatre’s stunning production of this Sondheim gem is nothing short of a masterpiece. A Little Night Music is one of my personal favorites from the Stephen Sondheim canon. Set in Sweden, circa 1900, it examines the intertwining lives of several couples who explore their romantic plights. Sondheim’s score, it is no secret, was composed […]
Fan of Prince of Broadway answers its critics
How do you begin to assemble a show based upon all of the Broadway musical productions connected to Hal Prince over a legendary career spanning nearly seven decades? How do you choose from roughly 5,000 songs in those shows? Accordingly to the creative team behind Prince of Broadway, with love, a desire to let everyone […]
Quotidian Theatre announces its new season
The Quotidian Theatre way-back machine will be in full operation this season, as the company’s four-play season starts in the present (or near-present) and catapults us back in time, landing eventually in Elizabethan England.
Review: Prince of Broadway, a highlights reel of a show
In his new memoir Sense of Occasion, Hal Prince explains that Prince of Broadway, the new Broadway revue celebrating and sampling Prince’s extraordinary 70-year career in the theater, “was entirely the idea of a Canadian producer” (not, in other words, Prince’s idea), and concedes that it is in several ways at odds with the landmark […]
The Wizard of Hip (Or When in Doubt, Slam Dunk) at MetroStage (review)
Thomas W. Jones II is older and grayer than when I saw his show 25 years ago but The Wizard of Hip is just as poignant and entertaining as he struts his stuff and delivers bucket loads of amazing life-observations. No one delivers lightning bolts of truth like Jones, and here is an opportunity to listen […]
Deep Cuts: a Lesson from Whipping’s Beer Man
In the past few days, as I’ve let Kathleen Akerley’s play Whipping, or The Football Hamlet (and this review) settle in my mind, I realize that my review perhaps comes off more harshly critical than I intended. Longacre Lea plays have a deserved reputation of inspiring polarizing, even heated, opinions. Such is the nature of […]
Shakespeare Theatre’s Free for All, an Othello for these times (review)
Shakespeare is our North Star because every time we do one of his great plays, it is an opportunity to rethink our assumptions, as they define our present selves. I first saw Othello in 1969, when the Civil Rights Act was in the past but racism and segregation were not. The moment that it became […]
Whipping, or The Football Hamlet (review)
Whipping, or the Football Hamlet has rushed into CUA’s Callan Theater with Kathleen Akerley calling this play as writer and director as she does most every humid DC August. As a theatergoer, it’s an exciting time. Just before the mass of September openings that signal the start of the theater season, Akerley often offers a […]
Creative Cauldron’s new season
It will be time for the Women’s Voices Festival next January, but at Falls Church’s Creative Cauldron, every play in its 2017-2018 season will be an examination of the experiences of women — of all ages and stations.
Review: Big Fish at Keegan Theatre
In my family, my father was the Big Fish: a teller of tall tales and elaborate shaggy dog stories. Most families have someone like him: someone for whom life must be larger, greater, more colorful than the workaday humdrum it mostly turns out to be. In Big Fish, traveling salesman Edward Bloom is that storyteller- […]