Sheldon Epp’s Twelve Angry Men, his directorial debut at the historic Ford’s Theatre, promised a present-day take on the 1954 legal drama that follows jury deliberations in the murder trial of a teenager accused of killing his own father. In interviews leading up to the show’s opening, Epps noted that his production, first staged at […]
Archives for January 2019
Kleptocracy review. A Russian oligarch becomes Putin’s enemy
Kenneth Lin wrote for “House of Cards” back when “House of Cards” was cool. But what denizens of our town know is that, for the terrifying and the bizarre, there ain’t nothin’ like the real thing, baby. So in Kleptocracy, Lin has written about the rise and fall of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (Max Woetendyke) who, for […]
Gulf View Drive review at Washington Stage Guild. Masterful.
For Washington Stage Guild patrons, the downtown theatre company’s current production offers a bit of closure. After introducing DC audiences to a complicated young couple in Last Train to Nibroc in 2017, the Guild presented the follow up play See Rock City last year. Now May and Raleigh return for the Nibroc Trilogy’s final chapter, […]
Review: Paula Vogel’s comedy The Baltimore Waltz
Writers excavate the marrow of life in order to create their fictional universes, and thus are sometimes required to mine their own marrow for their art. So it was with Paula Vogel, who lost her brother Carl — a witty, sophisticated and elegant gentleman, to judge from the instructions he left for his obsequies (set […]
Admissions review. Joshua Harmon’s scathing comedy big hit with Studio audiences. 4 extensions!
A couple of weeks ago, the satire site McSweeney’s published an article entitled, “How Can I Help to Promote Diversity Without Relinquishing Any of My Power?” This title alone could serve as an incredibly succinct synopsis of Joshua Harmon’s Admissions, now playing at Studio Theatre, where Harmon’s previous play Bad Jews holds the distinction of […]
Jeffrey review. Paul Rudnick’s comedy of love in the time of AIDS
There’s no such thing as love without risk. Risk of rejection. Risk of your partner finding someone else. But for gay men in the ‘80s and ‘90s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, love and sex carried more than just emotional risk—there was physical, mortal danger to be dealt with as well. And so, […]
Review: Submission, a dystopian view of Muslim Brotherhood’s takeover of Europe
Do you think we have problems, with our enormous partisan divide? It is 2022, and the French are electing a new President. In one corner, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen (Stacy Whittle), France’s Apostle of Intolerance, for whom the concept of national identity is seamlessly fused with the identity of the native-born. In the […]
Review: Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights gets the Pointless treatment in Visions of Love
The Pointless Theatre collaborators are skilled adaptors of familiar stories. Using a unique visual approach to theater and storytelling, the company finds the pulse points, the underlying heart beats of each story, and finds fresh ways to bring it all to the stage. They accomplished this with Sleeping Beauty, Minnie the Moocher, Imogen, and now […]
School of Rock: The Musical review
I normally don’t like dumb movies of the kind in which the actor Jack Black has made a conspicuous brand. But School of Rock, the sleeper hit from 2003, wasn’t that dumb—it was funny and sweet, a crowd-pleaser featuring a soundtrack from my youth and a career-defining turn from Black. Now School of Rock: The […]
American Moor review. Keith Hamilton Cobb in a magnetic performance
Keith Hamilton Cobb (or at least, the actor he’s playing) isn’t exactly afraid that his director might accuse him of playing the race card when it comes to his opinions over Othello. Once that young, white director decided to stage that play, he says, the man picked up the entire “race deck.” To be clear, […]
Matthew Bourne’s ‘Cinderella’: A masterful reimagining
Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Sunday, is brilliantly imagined and executed. Forget your Disney conceptions, or even the Rostislav Zakharov or Frederick Ashton ballet precursors to the same score by Sergei Prokofiev. Bourne and his New Adventures Company, in this revised version of his 1997 production, bring an idiosyncratic but deeply stirring […]
Remembering Carol Channing
What I remember most vividly about Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, some forty years after I saw her performance, are her eyes, and the surprising vulnerability, even neediness, that they expressed. Those were not the qualities I was expecting to encounter as, during a college break, I learned that Channing was touring the show to […]