Despite its premiere date of February 14, Among the Dead is not a Valentine’s Day play. Written by Hansol Jung, a world-traveling playwright and director from South Korea, Among the Dead is a ghost story orbiting the February 14th birthday of Korean American Ana Woods as she experiences firsthand the far-from-romantic conditions that created her. […]
Archives for February 2019
Review: Thunder Knocking on the Door. Creative Cauldron’s hit returns
Filled with down home moaning blues sprinkled with glittering magical realism, Thunder Knocking on the Door is packing the house at Creative Cauldron. In a small southern Alabama town, a mysterious guitar player who calls himself Marvell Thunder shows up on the doorstep of an unassuming musical family bringing a challenge, wreaking havoc and possible […]
The Heiress review, a triumph for Laura C. Harris, leading Arena’s fine cast
We knew about autism in 1947, when Ruth and Augustus Goetz translated Henry James’ “Washington Square” to the stage as The Heiress, but we understood it only as a sum-zero disorder: the patient was either irreparably locked into an impenetrable, uncommunicative state or he was not. Now, of course, we understand autism to be a […]
Review: Richard the Third, David Muse’s grisly version at Shakespeare Theatre Company
Director David Muse’s Richard the Third is clearly rendered, scored to propulsive industrial rock and sets itself apart from previous productions by a series of grisly execution scenes, but, for all of that, I was left curiously unmoved. Shakespeare’s tragic version of Richard, the Duke of Gloucester (1452-1485), his mad, ruthless rise to power atop the […]
Review: WORLD STAGES’ NeoArctic – disturbing, challenging and strangely beautiful
Temperatures dropped sharply inside the Kennedy Center last night; they rose again exponentially. There were other, sometime violent, meteorological disturbances. In short, in the space of 80 minutes, the multi-media NeoArtic asks us to journey with the work in a disturbing yet also strangely beautiful and elegiac investigation into what science writer Elisabeth Kolbert has termed […]
Review: Cyrano de Bergerac. A knockabout clown in love with a tiny dancer
Confession time: When I fell in love with theatre, I really fell for Cyrano, Roxanne, Christian and their heady love triangle. And the swashbuckling. And the language. Edmond Rostand’s heroic and poetic swordsman with the prominent nose practically leapt off the page for me and my imagination as a high school student. My heart skipped […]
Review: Huckleberry Finn’s Big River at Adventure Theatre MTC
Adventure Theatre MTC in Glen Echo Park has put runaways Huck and Jim back on a raft down the mighty Missisippi in a revamped version of the musical Big River, itself based on Mark Twain’s tale. This time, Huckleberry Finn’s Big River is for today’s young audiences. Huckleberry Finn is one of the most challenged […]
Studio Theatre plans to sever ties with their famed acting conservatory. Here’s Joy Zinoman’s plan
The Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory, which has turned out professional actors for forty-three years, will no longer be affiliated with Studio Theatre after this summer, founder Joy Zinoman revealed in a post on medium.com yesterday. “With no warning, the leadership of Studio Theatre — which I founded three years after the first class of the […]
The Wolves review. Teens playing teens pays off for NextStop in Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-nominated play
Imagine a mass of humans in a great hubbub and babble of conversation. It could be the House of Representatives before the gavel sounds, or the nave of a church in the moment before services commence. The conversations ricochet off the walls and intersect with each other. They could be about the Khmer Rouge, for […]
Shakespeare Theatre Company’s 2019/2020 season – Simon Godwin’s announces: new ‘classics’, new children’s musical and 2019’s Free For All
William Shakespeare will get two of the six slots in Simon Godwin’s debut season at Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC), along with four playwrights never before seen on STC’s stages: James Baldwin, Emma Rice, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Lauren Gunderson. STC began their announcement, the first such season announcement from any area production company, by sharing the […]
Review: Anatole: Mouse Magnifique, ageless fun at Imagination Stage
Imagination Stage has put together a tasty spread of charming adventures in their musical production of Anatole: Mouse Magnifique. The show has a smorgasbord of delights that consider not only what would be entertaining for the kids in the audience, but also what would satisfy the adults accompanying them. Anatole is based on the children’s […]
Review: GALA’s El viejo, el joven y el mar (The Old Man, the Youth, and the Sea)
Twentieth-century Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno wasn’t afraid to criticize Spain’s government. Though Irma Correa’s El viejo, el joven y el mar is a fictional depiction of Unamuno’s life, it is set against the historical backdrop of Miguel Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship over Spain, a dictatorship that Unamuno openly spoke out against, despite the consequences. Thankfully, […]