Hooded, Or Being Black for Dummies is a challenging play. Having read every review from Mosaic Theater ‘s Helen-Hayes-nominated premiere in 2017, I thought I knew what to expect. I was wrong.
Archives for May 2018
Take Five! with Helen Hayes nominated Ensemble members
In theatre, an ensemble is the equivalent of a jazz combo, where people are listening so intently, seeming to breathe together, and taking turns to give and take focus, that it feels like a single, joyful and playful organism. Take 5! with Ensemble members … A.J. Calbert, Alex Vernon, Andre Hinds, Anna Grace Nowalk, Antoinette […]
Review: Pointless Theatre’s Rite of Spring
When Rite of Spring first premiered in Paris in 1913, the music and the dance proved so…strange and bizarre that it allegedly sparked a riot, resulting in 40 people being removed or arrested. Accounts vary. Either way, the music proved so outlandishly new and strange, and the dancing so modern and far removed from “Ballet” […]
Dance Nation Review: Funny, Sharp, Graphic Play about 13-Year-Old Girls
Dance Nation is a surprise, and a shock, and a delight. Although the characters are a team of 13-year-old competitive dancers from Liverpool, Ohio aiming to win the Boogie Down Grand Prix in Tampa Bay, Clare Barron’s play is not really about dancing. It is a funny, sharp and very blunt look at adolescent girls […]
Review: The Speed Twins at Venus Theatre, lesbians in purgatory
As it opens, The Speed Twins makes no bones about were you are: Dyke Heaven! A purgatory of sorts, set up like a seedy bar reminiscent of London’s now shuttered Gateways Club, where a drunken, lonely Ollie sits, head flat-out against a pub table awaiting something, or someone one, to happen. Enter Queenie, decked out in […]
400 Cuban artists at the Kennedy Center for Artes de Cuba
Cuba is flush with artistic richness but because of travel limitations over the years, few Americans have been able to experience the abundance of great painters and performing artists that live and work just 103 miles from the U.S.
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire Review: Caryl Churchill’s Early Political Play May Meet Some Resistance
To director Rachel Chavkin, her revival of Caryl Churchill’s early play about the English Civil War is a well-timed political work about a failed revolution, whose characters may inspire American theatergoers who see themselves as members of a modern-day Resistance. I suspect many audience members at New York Theatre Workshop, though, will offer some […]
Review: Candide from Washington National Opera: glorious with a bit more bite
Candide is one of those hybrids (opera/Broadway show) that seemed so radical and ungainly a child when it first appeared in 1953 that it shocked and raised the critical ire of many. No one was quite sure where or how to produce it. So, naturally it was a must for the mercurial appetites of a […]
Take 5! with Helen Hayes nominated Musical Directors
A Musical Director collaborates with the Stage Director to set the musical framework then works painstakingly with both singer-actors and instrumentalists, blending sound so that everything comes together in a balanced whole. Take 5 with Musical Directors ……. Christopher Youstra, Darius Smith, Karen Hansen, Matt Hinkley, Ross Scott Rawlings, and 3-time nominee Walter “Bobby” McCoy. […]
Next season, Everyman salts fresh plays among the prize winners
Baltimore’s Everyman Theatre has devised a 2018-2019 season designed to set you up with prize-winning plays and classics, and then blow you away with acclaimed fresh works, including two from DC playwright Caleen Sinnette Jennings.
Backstage with Constellation’s creators of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle
Constellation is back again with some of its finest signature work, with sweeping, epic tales told with large casts and innovative theatrical magic, and beautiful production value. I’ve seen many of Constellation’s epic pieces, from Ramayana to The Journey West, and the constant use of color, space, levels, and sound to tell these stories is […]
Review: The Barber of Seville from Washington National Opera
Washington, especially the State Department it seems, wants to get back its swagger (sic.) No need to look further than taking a cue from the newly landed stellar body in our midst, baritone Andrey Zhilikhovsky. From the back of the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, his Figaro launched the character’s first clarion notes in darkness under […]
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