Stephanie Ybarra, The Public Theater’s Director of Special Artistic Projects, will be the new Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage, the company has announced. She succeeds Kwame Kwei-Armah, who left Baltimore Center Stage to become Artistic Director of London’s Young Vic Theatre in January of this year. Ybarra, a graduate of Baylor University and the Yale […]
Archives for August 2018
Review: Douglas Turner Ward’s Happy Ending at Anacostia Playhouse
You may have heard of Douglas Turner Ward’s 1965 Day of Absence, but might not be as aware of his other one-act play that was often performed as a full evening. Here’s a chance to finally catch his comedy Happy Ending, produced by the relatively new All About the Drama Theatre Group in collaboration with Anacostia Playhouse.
On the intimacy of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, Signature director Matthew Gardiner
No one can put music and lyrics together the way Stephen Sondheim has done – astonishingly – for decades, since the mid-1950’s. In my interview with Matthew Gardiner, who is directing a new production of Passion for Signature Theatre, I asked him not only about where he thinks the musical sits in the Sondheim canon […]
Be More Chill Review: Sci-Fi Fantasy of Teen Angst Makes it to Off-Broadway
To outsiders, Be More Chill is a hyper-energetic pop-rock musical opening tonight Off-Broadway, starring Will Roland (Dear Evan Hansen) as a high school student named Jeremy Heere who sees himself as a loser but then swallows a pill containing a supercomputer and becomes cool. Jeremy’s journey is of course a sci-fi fantasy. But thanks to […]
The best of the New York Musical Festival. Producers take note.
Alzheimer’s, homophobia, transphobia, immigration, the 1960s, and emojis: These were some of the subjects in the 15th annual New York Musical Festival, or NYMF, which presented 30 musicals – a mix of full productions, concerts and readings – over the last four weeks.
Review: The Bridges of Madison County at Keegan Theatre
From Kurt Boehm’s direction and nuanced yet sure performances of the leads to Michael Innocenti’s evocative gorgeous lighting and Patrick Lord’s projections, Keegan Theatre’s The Bridges of Madison County injects spine and humor into a sentimental journey and brings the heartland to life.
Kurt Boehm talks about Keegan’s answer to this summer of hate, The Bridges of Madison County.
“This is a good time for this piece to be in this city,”director Kurt Boehm says of The Bridges of Madison County, now onstage at Keegan Theatre. No matter what side of the political aisle you are on, you can’t deny there’s an underbelly of hate going on. This show does the opposite and gives […]
Review: Dinner makes its devastatingly funny area debut at 4615
Imagine that George and Martha from Virginia Woolf invited the squabbling couples from God of Carnage over for a spot of dinner and some Hitchcock-style mystery and you pretty much have Dinner, a carnivorous, hysterically funny Moira Buffini play done by the hot new company, 4615.
Review: The Color Purple’s ‘Push da Button’ a showstopper at The Kennedy Center
Trimmed up and in glorious voice on all accounts, the national tour of The Color Purple has moved into the Eisenhower Theatre at the Kennedy Center. And Hamilton, packing them in next door in the Opera House, had better be warned. The Color Purple might blow the roof off of the place.
Review: Legrand musical Amour
Perhaps you have never heard of Amour, the musical with a score by the prolific French composer Michel Legrand. Perhaps it was champagne when the masses wanted beer back in 2002 when it opened on Broadway – or the lure of The Producers and Thoroughly Modern Millie (which won the Tony for Best Musical that year.) Where […]
Review: The Story of the Gun by Mike Daisey
What do you get when you take one of America’s most controversial theatre artists and its most divisive political issue and put them in a room together in our nation’s capital? In the case of Mike Daisey’s The Story of the Gun, on stage now at Woolly Mammoth for a limited run, you get a […]
Casting for Michel Legrand’s Amour, NextStop stages a reunion from its storied past
NextStop Theatre is celebrating its 30th year, a history that took root as the Elden Street Players in 1988, when the newly-formed community theatre took over a Herndon-based warehouse and created an ideal black box space. The company kicks off its season by paying tribute to the Elden Street Players’ 25 years of excellence before the […]
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