Stephanie Ybarra’s first season as Artistic Director of Baltimore Center Stage will be full of new stories from fresh artists but will also include one of the oldest stories in all of theater — will run, in short, from Backhaus to the Bacchae. Center Stage’s 2019-2020 season will start out with a musical it is […]
Archives for March 2019
Daddy Long Legs review. Monumental Theatre’s polished production outshines the musical
When two highly engaging performers are saddled with less than dynamic material, you can at least revel in their onstage chemistry and delightful voices. Even the design work attempts to elevate the piece with period detail and artistic flourishes. But a nice set is not enough to inject much-needed oomph into a sung-through romance that […]
Queen of Basel review. Strindberg’s Miss Julie gets a fresh update and moves to Miami
If every copy of August Strindberg’s Miss Julie spontaneously combusted, and from each pile of ashes emerged phoenix-like a copy of Hilary Bettis’s Queen of Basel in its place, I could be persuaded that this is an overall net gain for literature, apart from the tears of a few theatrical purists and chauvinism apologists (not […]
Review: Hands on a Hardbody. Gotta have that truck!
My sister asked me what play I was going to see as we wrapped up our phone call. “Oh, it’s a musical about one of those contests where people stand around a truck and the last person who takes their hands off it wins the truck,” I said. “Wait…that’s a musical?” was her response. Sure, […]
Review: Confection, a sumptuous, sugary 17th century banquet and its cost
I’m a sucker for Shakespeare. And having lived on Capitol Hill for more than a decade and enjoyed many events at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the opportunity to participate in an “immersive theater experience,” held in the library’s opulent and rarely-accessed Paster and Sedgwick-Bond reading rooms that also included desserts was deliciously alluring. My appetite […]
Review: Macbeth. We Happy Few’s minimalist staging still manages to spook
It amazes me how much the We Happy Few theatre company is able to accomplish through their signature, minimalist approach, and their production of Macbeth exemplifies this. With a cast of five portraying the play’s lofty number of characters in an intimate, black box setting, Macbeth is deliciously eerie. It’s a quick-paced version of The […]
Opera review: Eugene Onegin features a Tatiana for our times
The wait of thirty years came to an end Saturday night when Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin returned to Washington in a spare yet stunningly beautiful production. The minimalist ‘box’ set became a canvas for color and light to carry the audience not only through the hours of a day and memories shared in autumnal display […]
Review: Silent, spectacular performance from Dublin’s Fishamble
It’s a rare gift for a play to present a despairing character with both lightness and the sincerity he deserves. Silent and its subject, Tino, are by turns funny, bleak, and feverish, but always riveting. One minute into this show, as Tino slowly emerges from beneath a blanket on stage in a kind of haunting, […]
Review: Picasso. Bilingual fun with the artist from GALITA
The magic and artistry of Pablo Picasso shine through in this fun-filled family show at GALA. Playwright director Cornelia Cody brings his talent to life through stories, music, dance and even circus fun finally bringing the artist’s fixation on harlequin clowns to light. Camilo Linares as Picasso is a whirlwind of energy, bouncing across the […]
Be More Chill on Broadway review.
Somebody wrote “NYC Loves BMC” in chalk on the sidewalk outside Broadway’s Lyceum Theater, the new home of Be More Chill, the high energy, high decibel pop-rock musical that stars Will Roland as a self-proclaimed high school “loser” who swallows a pill containing a supercomputer and becomes cool. I tweeted a picture of the scrawled […]
Review: Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity asks when the earth becomes chaos, what is worth saving
You have one shoe box and twenty minutes until your house burns to the ground. What do you save? In Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, Signature Theatre asks not only what art is worth saving, but also which memories, beliefs, and people. Heather McDonald’s play, developed and produced for its world […]
Review: Indecent. Paula Vogel’s play is incandescent
“This play changed my life,” proclaims shtetl tailor-turned-stage-manager Lemml (Ben Cherry) in Paula Vogel’s incandescent Indecent, and as you look up in wonder at the candle and stage-lit faces in Baltimore Center Stage’s extraordinary production you know exactly what he means. This is as good as it gets, readers. Vogel’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning play is […]