In the 2019-2020 theater season, Arena Stage may well be the place to go to meet interesting people: the acid-tongued Texas Governor Ann Richards; Fidel Castro; Ken Ludwig’s mom and dad, some of August Wilson’s unforgettable Hill District denizens, two survivors of Taliban brutality, and the woman who took over second base for the Negro […]
Archives for March 2019
Crying Hands. Treatment of the deaf and disabled under Hitler and Mussolini
“The growth of Nazism during the past few years frightens me. Today’s populist politicians use rhetoric that is identical to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s propaganda. New generations need to be told what happened during the war and they need to be reminded how it could happen,” Norwegian actor, director and playwright Bentein Baarson said. Baarson learned […]
Review: Cirkus Cirkör’s Limits. Swedish acrobatic troupe knows no limits.
We here in Washington, DC are no strangers to a “political circuses,” but it was hard to know what to expect from Swedish acrobatic troupe Cirkus Cirkör, whose past performances have been described as “contemporary circus activism.” The troupe’s newest piece Limits—part jaw-dropping acrobatics, part contemporary ballet, interspersed with feats of strength, live music, mind-bending […]
Review: Vanity Fair. Thackeray’s novel gets a giddy, superficial stage adaptation
“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place,” writes the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, “full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.” The title of Thackeray’s famous novel is drawn from John Bunyan’s reference in Pilgrim’s Progress to man’s insatiably material, wanton nature. Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Vanity Fair, framed by […]
Olney Theatre Center announces its 2019-2020 season
The 2019-2020 season will be a busy one at Olney Theatre Center with 16 plays, concerts, and presentations as part of the company’s 82nd season. Musicals will frame the opening of the season and of the new year, with Cabaret kicking off the season, and Miss You Like Hell, a new musical from Erin McKeown […]
Review: Blood at the Root by Dominique Morisseau at Theater Alliance
At the top of Dominique Morisseau’s Blood at the Root, teens burst onto the stage in a blast of energy and music, reciting lines filled with wild rhythms and formations coming every which way, bodies in a cacophony of movement, stopping in a freeze to elucidate salient points about their lives. They are exuberant teens, […]
Review: Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. Rodney King witnessed
How can one play make you low in spirit but high on life? In less than two hours, Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 takes you on a whip-smart ride between sadness that race and class issues remain unchanged since the 1992 Rodney King verdict and uprising—and in some ways are actually worse—and exhilaration at witnessing fine […]
Joy Zinoman’s Studio Acting Conservatory finds a home, and Broadway producer pitches new idea for theatres seeking spaces
Joy Zinoman’s Studio Acting Conservatory, which must vacate Studio Theatre this summer, will be safe to continue on, Zinoman announced on Kojo Nnamdi’s show today. The City of Washington has helped locate temporary space for her program at the Garnet-Patterson Middle School, which was also the 3 year nesting ground for Duke Ellington School of […]
Review: Oil, a sprawling and ambitious drama, makes its American debut at Olney
British playwright Ella Hickson gets an American premiere of her sprawlingly ambitious and provocative play at Olney Theatre Center. Oil is a play written up as a “nexus of oil, economics, and power.” But if oil is the premise for this for the play, it serves less as a central character and more a backdrop, […]
Review: Next Stop: North Korea. John Feffer’s latest looks inside the world’s most secretive society
Few foreign lands loom larger in the American imagination than North Korea, despite and because the average outsider knows almost nothing about the country. We’re in the dark by design: the U.S. restricts and currently bans tourist travel, the North Korean Central News Agency emits pure propaganda every day, and our countries’ diplomatic communications are […]
Quotidian announces 2 plays for 2019.
For its 2019 season, Quotidian will offer audiences the opportunity to see two plays which they may have missed during their runs earlier in the area. The season will open with Michael Hollinger’s Ghost-Writer. The novelist Franklin Woolsey is accomplished, successful and, unfortunately, dead. His secretary, however, continues to take dictation. The work is beautiful, […]
We Three Queens of Richard the Third: Robynn Rodriguez, Lizan Mitchell and Sandra Shipley give insights into history’s lesson
I asked three actors, all playing female royalty in Richard the Third at Shakespeare Theatre Company, to talk about what might convince wavering potential audiences to see this production. Sandra Shipley plays The Duchess of York, mother of Richard III:I’d like to say, right off the top, that, because of the way the play […]