I expect that, if you’ve found your way to this review, you will love the national tour of the recent Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly!, newly ensconced at Kennedy Center’s Opera House. Look at the old girl now, indeed. Jerry Zaks has directed an almost perfectly realized production, and the cast of the tour is […]
Archives for June 2019
Review: Grease at Toby’s Dinner Theatre
Grease is still “the” word, judging from the packed house and enthusiastic response to the 50’s-style Broadway score most people can easily sing along with. The stage show has been a popular favorite for years; the 1978 film version solidified it as a movie musical icon. Toby’s Dinner Theatre has brought out the leather jackets, […]
“Theater Alliance is on the precipice of something big.” Jennifer Clements, newly appointed Managing Director of Theater Alliance
Theater Alliance has appointed Jennifer Clements as the company’s Managing Director. She joins Raymond O. Caldwell, who became the company’s Producing Artistic Director in January, 2019. Clements, an essayist, poet and playwright and a former theater critic for DC Theatre Scene, most recently served as Associate Creative Director at Impact Communications, where she crafted strategies […]
Who SHOULD win the 2019 Tony Awards Sunday night and why
This was an adventurous year for Broadway, with several unconventional works that seemed a more comfortable fit Off-Broadway or even Off-Off Broadway. This is a welcome development, albeit a complicated one when choosing who and what I think should win in the 2019 Tony Award’s 26 categories. How much should one weigh fresh if sometimes […]
Dane Figueroa Edidi talks about Klytmnestra and working as a Black, Trans Woman in DC
Dane Figueroa Edidi: “To be Black, and a woman and trans means each time someone experiences you or your work there is a shift that has to happen in others for them to even begin to lean in.” Dane Figueroa Edidi and I had the chance to work together back in 2013 at Spooky Action […]
Review: A New Brain from Iron Crow Theatre
A medical emergency. If that’s not song and dance material, I don’t know what is. But under composer William Finn’s tunefully neurotic steerage, serious brain trauma becomes a bright, fresh and improbably uplifting tribute to the power of art to heal and transform. A New Brain, staged with smartness and sparkle by Iron Crow Theatre […]
Review: Rajiv Joseph’s Describe the Night at Woolly Mammoth Theatre
“Fiction carries a greater amount of truth in solution than the volume which purports to be all true,” wrote British novelist William Makepeace Thackery, author of Vanity Fair. This simple sentence seems to be the mission statement behind Rajiv Joseph’s Obie Award-winning play, Describe the Night, currently closing out Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s 2018–2019 season. […]
Review: Richard III, a dystopian cyberpunk vision from Synetic Theater
Shakespeare’s most iconic schemer is the centerpiece of Synetic’s fourteenth (mostly) wordless re-interpretation of the Bard’s works. The world of 15th century England is updated to a dystopian cyberpunk future, with soulless, almost robotic soldiers, technology gone rogue, a terrifying landscape upon which Synetic’s trademark physicality and visuals create a breathtakingly theatrical tour de force. […]
Review: The Tale of Serse. Handel’s rarely seen opera gets a stunning production from In Series
Timothy Nelson has ended his first season as Artistic Director of In Series with a stunning and musically gorgeous production of The Tale of Serse. Like George Frideric Handel, the composer of the opera, Nelson is a synthetic artist who likes to tweak and merge disparate material to create radical new experiences for the operatic […]
Infinity’s new season will feature a hi-tech Fantasticks
New York-based Infinity Theatre Company will offer a two-show season this summer in Annapolis. The season will feature Rodgers and Hammerstein’s A Grand Night for Singing in collaboration with Live Arts Maryland and the long-running off-Broadway hit The Fantasticks. A Grand Night, done under the baton of Live Arts Maryland’s Artistic Director, J. Ernest Green, […]