In Series, for many years under the leadership of its founder Carla Hübner, will begin its first season with Timothy Nelson as Artistic Director this September, mashing great composers up with great writers, updating old texts and giving them new meaning, and, for the holidays and the new year, bringing us some old favorites.
Archives for June 2018
Who SHOULD win The Tony Awards Sunday night and why
The 2018 Tony Awards will be presented Sunday, June 10 at 8pm (ET) on CBS. Despite the Broadway League’s crowing about the 2017-2018 season being “the highest-grossing and highest-attended season in Broadway recorded history”, the season was not the best.
Review: Avant Bard’s The Tempest, theatrical magic
Shakespeare’s brave new world – a desolate island miles aways from Europe – is the fantastical setting where The Tempest offers up a blend of danger, romance, intrigue, family strife and, ultimately, joy. All these qualities are handled with panache and delicious theatrical magic by WSC Avant Bard for their closing production of their 28th […]
Another major change has come to DC theatre. Forum Theatre has closed.
Forum Theatre, long noted in DC for its raw and politically provocative theatermaking, has elected to cease operations, effective immediately.
Review: Trayf at Theater J
Two 19-year-old Yeshiva students set out on a mission to support less-dedicated Jews on the streets of New York, but their faith and friendship are tested in the world premiere of Lindsay Joelle’s Trayf. Theater J gives the new work an outstanding production that reveals Joelle as a playwright of great skill and promise.
Celebrating Shalwitz: report from the scene Monday night for the One and Only Howard Shalwitz
From the theater that prodded, poked, and provoked for nigh on forty years rose the unlikeliest of DC’s hallowed institutions and its leader – Howard Shalwitz. Many from the Woolly Mammoth herd gathered together Monday night to pay tribute to the man. The occasion of Shalwitz’ announced retirement had sparked the altogether curious affair. Though […]
Review: To the Clouds earns claps from The Shark and her daddy critic
Theater critics, at least good ones, should be grizzled theatergoing veterans and yet be centered and sensitive enough to relive the experience of the newcomer every time they see a show. To be a brutally honest with myself, I was only one of those at a Saturday matinee performance of To the Clouds from Arts […]
Review: Bob Bartlett’s Swimming with Whales outstanding debut at 1st Stage
Personal, funny, poetic, rough around the edges – Bob Bartlett’s Swimming with Whales is well worth checking out while it’s at 1st Stage as I predict it will have life beyond its northern Virginia run.
From painting to stepping, Step Afrika! closes its season with its acclaimed The Migration
In 1941, Jacob Lawrence became one of the first black artists to have his work shown in a New York City art gallery, with his powerful Migration Series on display, a sequence of 60 paintings depicting the mass movement of over 5 million African Americans from the rural South to the urban North between World […]
Review: Botticelli in the Fire, an explosive queer comedy set in 15th century Italy
Fans of Jordan Tannahill’s work, including his 2015 book Theatre of the Unimpressed: In Search of Vital Drama—a screed against the ubiquity of the well-made play and the modern theatre’s propensity to workshop the risk of failure out of every script—know better than to walk into Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s U.S. premiere production of Botticelli […]
Review: An Iliad. Homer’s Trojan War epic in the time of nuclear weapons
A bright young team of theater professionals brings Homer’s epic to Washington for a fresh look at An Iliad, and the production packs a powerful punch.
Review: The Scottsboro Boys at Signature Theatre
Signature Theatre and its own “Scottsboro boys” have given us a musical for our times. Smart. Searing. Dangerous. Funny. Provocative. And – as it continues to expose and engage us in a conversation about race – it is immensely moving. And it’s all wrapped up in a Kander & Ebb musical entertainment. Giving double meaning […]