Am I wearing the right shirt? Is the bottle of wine I brought too cheap? Should I go in for the kiss at the end of the night? These are common questions running through the mind of your average participant in a blind date. The world of Craig Wright’s barely-post-9/11 drama, Recent Tragic Events—currently being […]
Archives for January 2020
Review: Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline at Studio Theatre
Playwright Dominique Morisseau has had a whirlwind last few years since her play Pipeline premiered in 2017. In that span of time, she’s managed to begin her tenure as a Residency 5 playwright at Signature Theatre in New York City, earn a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and pick up a Tony nomination for writing the book […]
Review: Kinky Boots kicks up its 6″ heels at Toby’s
What do you do when nobody’s buying what you’re selling? Change what you’re selling. The long-running Broadway production of Kinky Boots closed last spring, but Toby’s brings back the happy romp with all its bells and whistles, and no small amount of glitter. It’s a show that uniquely suits Toby’s, one of the few in […]
Review: A Soldier’s Play on Broadway at long last.
Charles Fuller’s murder mystery, finally on Broadway in a fine production directed by Kenny Leon some four decades after it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is so good that even if you’ve seen the 1984 movie adaptation A Soldier’s Story (which marked Denzel Washington’s major movie debut) and remember who done it, the play […]
Broadway review: Grand Horizons. A starry cast for a hip, old-fashioned comedy.
“I think I would like a divorce,” Jane Alexander as Nancy French says to her husband of 50 years, played by James Cromwell. “All right,” Bill replies. Blackout. More production photos at NewYorkTheater.me That’s all the dialogue in the first scene of Grand Horizons, which has the rhythms of an old-fashioned comedy in the remaining […]
Review: Bourne’s New Adventures: ‘Swan Lake’ still shocks with its transgressive beauty
It seems like just yesterday that Matthew Bourne’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of a classic triggered gents to walk out at the sight of two men partnered and young girls to cry when confronted with a narrative so different from the storybook tutued tale they had anticipated. A quarter-century later, his radical take still shocks, but less […]
Special DCTS ticket deal: 35% off Silent Sky at Ford’s Theatre
From Ford’s Theatre – Save on tickets to Silent Sky at Ford’s Theatre—a captivating play by Lauren Gunderson about trail-blazing astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt. A decade before women gained the right to vote, Leavitt and her fellow women “computers” transformed the science of astronomy. This inspiring drama explores the determination, passion and sacrifice of the women […]
Review: Folger Theatre takes leave of Capitol Hill with an hilarious sendup of the 70s, Merry Wives of Windsor
“The plot is certainly thin,” said one grouchy-looking woman as she left Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s new staging of the Bard’s Merry Wives of Windsor. But the friend she was talking to was still laughing, which is kind of the point. Wives, like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, exists mainly to twist characters in plotting knots, and […]
2020 trends in Opera: DC area opera companies are confronting race, sex and gender discrimination
It was a rare pleasure to share the stage at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center less than a week ago with colleagues who are also in the business of reviewing the performing arts. I have always thought Washington would be better served and advance an even more robust and renowned theatre scene if […]
Review: Joe Calarco’s A Measure of Cruelty from 4615 Theatre Company
There is something very refreshing about being an audience to theatre outside of a theater. 4615 Theatre Company is proving, as did the bar hopping runaway hit The Smuggler late last year, that theatre works perfectly well when set in a bar or restaurant, park, library, or town square. In this case, Measure takes over the historic […]
Broadway Review: My Name Is Lucy Barton, starring Laura Linney
“Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.” That’s what Laura Linney as Lucy Barton tells us from her New York hospital bed in this one-woman stage adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s novel. It’s an awfully high-falutin’ literary sentence […]
Sheltered at Theater J raises the question – with terror, isolation and the pressure to assimilate rampant today, can we envision a Providence for ourselves and others
“Are we? Are we human?” – a line of dialogue from Sheltered “Noah said ‘No, no you’re full of sin. God’s got the key and you can’t get in.” – lyrics of “Didn’t It Rain,” a spiritual “She called him everything but ‘a child of god.’ – a familiar saying I used to hear when […]
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