It’s happened: global warming has brought the world to the brink of an environmental apocalypse. Earth’s atmosphere can only support human life for one more year—maybe less. What do you do in your last few months of life?
Archives for April 2018
Review: Pinky Swear’s Metro play, Use All Available Doors
In the morning we go down, you and I, to the bowels of the Washington Metro Transit system and there jostle and sway, with hundreds of strangers, in metal rectangular boxes through tubes drilled far under the earth on the way to our myriad destinations. Playwright Brittany Alyse Willis does too, and so Willis wrote […]
Review: GALA’s En El Tiempo de Las Mariposas (In the Time of Butterflies)
Memory can be a warm blanket, a cruel knife, and a revolutionary act all at once. Gala Hispanic Theatre’s must-see En el Tiempo de Las Mariposas (In the Time of Butterflies) unfurls a gripping vision of life, love, and sacrifice under the ruinous rule of Dominican dictator General Rafael Trujillo. Gripping performances and audiovisual effects ensnare […]
Carousel busting out on Broadway
The new Carousel has the most glorious singing on Broadway, as well as thrilling choreography and picturesque sets and costumes that seem lifted from great American paintings by Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper. It also has a surprisingly dark story whose last half hour has aged so poorly it offers a bizarre mix of the ugly […]
Woolly Mammoth announces its 2018/2019 season
Maria Manuela Goyanes will take over as Woolly Mammoth’s new Artistic Director next season, and her first season itself will be full of familiar Woolly friends — Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Rajiv Joseph, The Upright Citizens Brigade, Mike Daisey, and the Second City.
Review: Cirque du Soleil’s Luzia
In the darkness, a disembodied voice tells us we are embarking on a journey and instructs us to ready ourselves for take off and to put our cell phones to airplane mode. Then so many thousands of miles up, it is announced we are to be jettisoned out of the aircraft. A goofy lovable Everyman, […]
Review: Royal Shakespeare Company’s King Lear
King Lear begins with a foolish ruler swayed by flattery, and ends with what Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Greg Doran calls “a strange, profound unease.” Shakespeare’s tragedy is, in other words, as relevant as ever. And director Doran’s often visually arresting if rarely shattering production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater, which […]
Powerful ‘wake up’ energy in Washington, DC: August Wilson, Peggy Cafritz and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr
This past week brought a powerful confluence of “wake up” energy to Washington, DC. Sunday, people gathered at Washington’s National Cathedral to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave his last sermon there fifty years ago a few short days before he was gunned down in Memphis. Last Friday, Duke Ellington School held a […]
Luzia’s U. S. artistic director guides us through Cirque du Soleil’s latest show now open in Tysons II
Cirque du Soleil’s Luzia is opening tonight and here through June 17, performing under its familiar big top in Tysons II, McLean, VA. And just like every Cirque show, this one promises to create a unique experience for the entire family.
The Kennedy Center announces 2018-2019 theater season
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will be serving a nine-course meal next season, with six musicals and three non-musicals occupying the five principal venues of the place for three weeks or longer. Another twelve short-run productions will serve as accompaniments, and there will be festivals – the Page-to-Stage festival to open […]
Review: Annie Baker’s John at Signature Theatre.
Theater is traditionally thought to be a place of communion, a meeting of like-minded souls who crave a good story. Playwright Annie Baker turns that expectation on its head, along with so many other theater conventions, with her quiet, sad and still play John, currently getting under your skin in a brilliant area premiere at […]
Review: Against a backdrop of a medical scandal, Theater J’s Roz and Ray is surprisingly uplifting
With a bare set and only two seen characters, Roz and Ray draws your focus to the weight of words between people. This intimate production, directed by Adam Immerwahr, Artistic Director of Theater J, wastes no time or aesthetics on distracting you from stark realities under harsh hospital lighting. Instead, it hurtles headlong through 11 […]