The Contemporary American Theater Festival’s annual 3-week July celebration will feature five world premieres and a recent work by “This is Us” producer and screenwriter Bekah Brunstetter.
Archives for March 2018
Big Apple Circus, now at National Harbor (review)
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Big Apple Circus. Designed originally as a small touring circus with just one ring and a few performers along the lines of traditional American circuses, it’s now outlived many of its predecessors, most notably, Ringling, Barnum and Bailey’s Circus which closed last year after a 140 year run.
Review: Baltimore Center Stage’s savage staging of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (review)
Those pigs. Can’t trust them, can’t ignite a revolution without them. Why can’t they just be content with being what they are–bacon? Pigs, propaganda, the proletariat and politics proliferate in Center Stage’s visceral, beautiful and chillingly relevant production of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s 1945 allegorical novel about freedom and dictatorships.
Review: Breathe – a new transformative musical
Breathe is a transformative work written and directed by Cleavon Meabon IV about the resilience of an African-American family trying to establish balance in the face of white violence. An announcer from TheARC stood before the sold out opening night crowd to offer a word of warning. “You will go through a range of emotions” he […]
Christopher Michael Richardson on being the Lion in The Wiz
Christopher Michael Richardson is “easing on down the road,” nightly as the Lion in Ford Theatre’s imaginative production of the Tony-winning, The Wiz, which runs through May 12.
Disgraced from Compass Rose Theater (review)
Ayad Akhtar’s Pulitzer Prize winning Disgraced is a thoughtful character study about American Muslim identity. Driven by casual conversations, the play reveals earnest and unsettling disclosures about the perceptions and misconceptions we all maintain and project about those with differing world views. Compass Rose Theater offers a fresh production with direction from James Bunzli at […]
Elaine May’s Adult Entertainment from The Klunch, an erudite offshoot from its Cherry Red roots (Review)
What do you think of this script for a possible Merchant/Ivory film? Fade in on Melissa, a young, very three-dimensional woman, sitting on a lounge chair in her underwear. Tina, her faithful maid, comes in to tell Melissa that her lover is at the door — with another man. They reminisce about Melissa’s first date […]
Review: This Little Light at Venus Theatre
This Little Light, like so many Venus Theatre productions, is a gem that radiates the very joy it dares us to find in ourselves, and each other, when we fear we’ve lost it most.
Review: The Texas Homecoming Revolution of 1995. Big laughs at Best Medicine Rep
The Texas Homecoming Revolution of 1995 has got to be one of the strangest titles that I’ve ever seen but the production is incredibly entertaining. The fast-moving script by Jennifer Faletto hits all the right notes with this gaggle of seniors soon to be graduating from a well-to-do Houston suburb. They’ve made their marks, planned […]
Banno’s Porno Pygmalion: Award-winning director back in town for Adult Entertainment
Elaine May’s play Adult Entertainment, currently in previews in a production by The Klunch, “is pretty delightful. It’s kind of a porno Pygmalion sort of play, in terms of porn stars suddenly getting an education, and figuring out what their lives should mean. There’s a lot of nice layers to it, but, more than anything […]
A Burial Place shows The Wheel has a growing presence in DC (review)
I’m going to spoil one of the twists in A Burial Place for you. It comes about 25 minutes into this 100-minute production of A Burial Place, and sadly those first minutes before learning the twist are kind of, well, boring. Whether this is a flaw in Owen Panettieri’s generally keen script, or a lack […]
Government study reveals DC arts and culture led the nation in contributions to the local GDP
According to the newly released study by the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, arts and culture have been good for the nation’s economy. And that has been especially true for DC, which led the nation in contributions to GDP.