Alexandria’s MetroStage will open with Athol Fugard’s most recent play, and then bring back three of its most acclaimed productions to round out its 2018-2019 season.
The Fugard is The Painted Rocks at Revolver Creek, the “tender, ruminative new play” (Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times) about a Black South African who supports himself by painting artistic designs on rocks during Apartheid, and his young apprentice who comes back as an adult, post-Apartheid, to restore his work. Veteran MetroStage director Thomas W. Jones will helm this play, which will run from August 30 to September 30, 2018.
The critically- and popularly-acclaimed Rooms will be next. Paul and Miriam Goodman’s two-actor musical is about an introverted, hard-drinking musician who falls in love with a lyricist and forms both an artistic and a personal partnership with her. Rooms, which MetroStage developed along with Rochester (NY)’s Geva Theatre, went on to New York and toured nationally. DCTS’s Steven McKnight called Rooms “the most emotionally real and authentic musical this reviewer has ever seen” in this review. From October 4 to November 4 of this year; Rick Hammerley will direct.
For the holidays, MetroStage will reprise Catherine Flye’s Christmas at the Old Bull & Bush, a visit to a circa-1910 British pub for an evening of music and nonsense. “[T]here is a skillful arc in devising the evening’s entertainment from the simple pleasures such as the American borrowed ‘Bicycle Built for Two’ to the most moving part of the evening when we were literally taken into the trenches of World War I,” DCTS’s Susan Galbraith said in this review. I recommend maximizing your enjoyment by sitting near the front so that you might be selected from the audience to play Tiny Tim. If so selected, be sure not to blow the iconic line. From November 20 to December 23, 2018; Flye will direct.
MetroStage will cap off the season with Three Sistahs, Janet Pryce’s application of themes from the similarly named Chekhov play to an African-American family in the late 1960s. DCTS’s Alan Katz called Three Sistahs “a gift to DC theater, local and incredibly orchestrated” in this review. The protean Thomas W. Jones supplies the book and lyrics; William Hubbard writes the music. No director has been announced for this show, which will run from January 24 to February 24 of next year.
Tickets are available at the MetroStage box office, 703.548.9044.
MetroStage is still producing from its N. Royal Street theatre in Alexandria, VA. The announced move to another venue has been postponed for a year.
