In a season with high profile productions of Little Shop of Horrors on Broadway and across the country, the DMV is getting its own taste of the Alan Menken sci-fi musical theatre classic this October, with a new twist. Little Shop of Horrors at Constellation Theatre Company may be in a small space, but they’re […]
Archives for October 2019
Review: What to Send Up When It Goes Down, coming soon to Woolly Mammoth
Aleshea Harris, author of What to Send Up When It Goes Down wrote: “The idea was to hold people accountable, be confrontational, let it be messy, let it be angry, and let it tread as absurdly as the idea that a Black person could be killed on camera unarmed and the person who killed them […]
Reflection: IN Series’ Stormy Weather could change how we experience The Tempest forever
“You don’t need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”- Bob Dylan Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a comedy in the sense that it has a happy ending. However, we only get to that happy ending by overlooking, accepting and/or not questioning the cruelty in Prospero’s governance of the island. I have always been […]
Review: Kid Prince and Pablo, a Hip Hop Mark Twain update
Mark Twain’s 1881 novel, The Prince and the Pauper, receives an engaging update (with a “digital, Hip Hop-infused twist”) at Kennedy Center’s Family Theater with the world premiere of the Kennedy Center-commissioned Kid Prince and Pablo, running now through November 3rd. The Twain original took readers back in time, imagining a 16th Century situation in […]
Review: Stormy Weather. IN Series reimagines Tempest by way of Billie Holiday
She devils. Film-noir temptresses. Crazy women in attics à la “Jane Eyre.” In art of all sorts, women who speak up, sashay to a different drummer or who just challenge male authority often get branded by such less-than-flattering terms. And they often suffer violent or at least unpleasant ends. That’s what happens to Sycorax, the […]
Review: Thoughts of a Colored Man at Baltimore Center Stage
I admired many things about my late father, among them that he never stopped learning or being curious about people and life, even at the age of 92 and grappling with major health issues. I took the spirit of my father into Baltimore Center Stage’s luminous production of Thoughts of a Colored Man and learned […]
2019 Gary Maker Award recipient Lou Altarescu speaks on love and the rewards of serving as an usher
Audiences attending the closing performance of George Bernard Shaw’s Candida at Washington Stage Guild Sunday, Oct 20th, witnessed a pre-show ceremony as Lou Altarescu accepted the 2019 Gary Maker Award on behalf of himself and his late spouse Alan Friedman, an honor he called “bittersweet” knowing how much it would have meant to Friedman. Lou […]
The Rose Tattoo Review: Marisa Tomei in Tennessee Williams’ comedy about a love-struck Sicilian widow
There are many cues to what’s wrong with this overly broad third Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ dated play, starring Marisa Tomei as Serafina Delle Rose, a Sicilian immigrant seamstress who turns from besotted wife to grieving widow to betrayed widow (because her husband had a mistress) to hopeful new lover. There are the dozens […]
My thoughts on seeing Thoughts of a Colored Man
Thoughts of a Colored Man by young poet/playwright Keenan Scott II masterfully tells nearly every part of the experience of being a Black Male in America today. The tagline “One Theme: Seven Variations” is quite accurate as this body of work depicts the emotions not often articulated in public: Wisdom, Passion, Depression, Lust, Happiness, Love […]
Review: Dracula at Chesapeake Shakespeare
Chesapeake Shakespeare’s production of Dracula is just what’s needed for this season of dying leaves and chills down the spine. Playwright Steven Dietz has taken the original Bram Stoker novel and transposed it nearly scene for scene. That’s both a good thing and a bad thing: this is no Hollywood Dracula, all polish and Art […]
Newly-renamed Avant Bard Theatre announces its 3-play season
Avant Bard Theatre, formerly known as WSC Avant Bard (and before that, as Washington Shakespeare Company), will mark its 30th anniversary with a new name, and a three-play season, Artistic Director Tom Prewitt announced at at a staged reading benefit of Don Marquis’ Archy and Mehitibel, which featured Rick Foucheux and Holly Twyford on Monday, […]
Thoughts upon seeing Day of Absence at Theater Alliance
In Joy Ikekhua’s insightful reflection on School Girls: or, the African Mean Girls Play at Roundhouse Theater, they noted their discomfort with watching, in public, a play that exposed and explored painful scars endured by “Black” people that result from the effects of internalized ”white” supremacy. School Girls focused primarily on “colorism,” which can manifest […]