Baltimore’s Chesapeake Shakespeare Company is presenting Henry IV, parts One and Two in repertory. Part One (not reviewed by DCTC, we regret) opened February 15th, Part Two opened March 15th, and they overlap for three weeks, offering three (now two) Saturdays where patrons can see Part One at 2pm, have a dinner break, then return […]
Archives for March 2019
Review: Topdog/Underdog, entertaining and unsettling.
Topdog/Underdog from WSC Avant Bard is an emotionally charged wonder that leaves no stone unturned or scab safely covered. The trailblazing story by Suzan-Lori Parks rips off the social bandage taped over societal ills and dares you to peer at the murky muck that’s left raw and exposed. Two brothers, abandoned in their teenage years, […]
Review: Beep Beep! from Arts on the Horizon trucking over to Atlas
You’re never too young to be taken to the theatre. And you’re never so young that you shouldn’t expect a lot from the theatre that is aimed toward you. That seems to be the proposition behind Arts on the Horizon, the wonderful local company whose target audience ranges from shortly after birth (I’ve seen, among […]
White Noise Review: Daveed Diggs as voluntary slave in Suzan-Lori Parks illuminating new play
Leo (Daveed Diggs) makes an outrageous request of his best friend Ralph (Thomas Sadoski) in Suzan-Lori Parks’ bizarre, disturbing and in some ways brilliant new play, White Noise, at the Public Theater. Leo wants to become Ralph’s slave. His tight circle of friends at first thinks Leo is joking. He’s not. Then the three of […]
Review: Dinner with Friends at Everyman Theatre
If breakups were only confined to the couple in question, life would be easier. Throw friends, children, potential new partners into the mix and it really takes a village to visit Splitsville with the inevitable detour into Crazy Town. Playwright Donald Margulies won the Pulitzer in 2000 for Dinner with Friends, his rueful and sad-funny […]
Fallen Angels review. NextStop rises to the occasion
Pre-dinner martinis turn into two bottles of champagne, which turn into nightcaps of Benedictine. The alcohol just keeps flowing during Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, and things get more and more amusing as the play gets looser and zanier. It doesn’t hurt that Elizabeth Anne Jernigan and particularly, Teresa Spencer, are pretty great at playing tipsy. […]
Review: The Jewish Queen Lear, world premiere of Yiddish theatre classic
Yiddish theatre in New York around the turn of the century was vibrant: in the small Bowery theaters, Jews of all nationalities and branches of Judaism came to watch shows full of emotion and sorrow, joy and exuberance, all in the tongue common to European Jews: Yiddish. Theater J, with the first full production of […]
Review: The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963
I had a wonderful time at The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963, a Theater for Young Audience’s world premiere Kennedy Center commission, on stage at the Center’s Eisenhower Theater through March 24th. The piece is moving, delightfully performed, and stingingly relevant. The Watsons of the title are an African-American family who live in Flint, […]
Review: JQA. Aaron Posner’s brilliant take on government, compromise and John Quincy Adams.
Most of us are uncompromising in our youth, and, buffeted by the winds of time and experience, grow smooth and mellow in our old age. In that sense, John Quincy Adams lived his life backward. As a young man, he was a prodigiously gifted diplomat, serving as ambassador to the Netherlands (at 26!), Prussia, Russia, […]
Review: For Washington National Opera, Faust is in the house
Only one week ago, Washington National Opera gave us a cool, minimalist modern take on a romantic opera (Eugene Onegin); this week the company took us back to an old world, even hedonistic approach to grand opera with its production of Charles Gounod’s Faust. It was in many ways being fed the operatic equivalent of […]
The Seagull review from The Wheel
Was Anton Chekhov touched with the gift of prophecy when he wrote the first of his four major plays, The Seagull? Or, even rarer, with self-awareness? The piece, which begins with a disastrous performance of an avant-garde play, was considered an epic failure upon its debut in Petersburg in 1896. The situation was so dire […]
Rep Stage announces its 2019-2020 season
Two shows about music — one an Outer Critics Circle Best Musical awardee; the other a show about the awfulest music ever — will bookend Rep Stage’s 2019-2020 Season, which will also include a world premiere by a local playwright and a much-acclaimed new play about life after life for recently slaughtered African-American males. The […]