Recent research has shown that humans’ domestication of dogs has altered canines’ brains. I have a theory — it has not yet been borne out by science, but I am confident that it will be — that cats have done the same to humans. Why else would we be in such devoted service to these […]
Review: Superb ‘Prufrock’ is among Chamber Dance Project premieres
The irresistible paradox of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is its gritty transcendence. It is grounded but out of body, a free-floating passage through a quotidian life with all its tedium and worries (baldness, aging, misunderstanding), as well as its elusive pleasures (flirting, art, peaches). With sad humor, it both acknowledges […]
Review: Ripcord, a disappointing odd couple comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire
In David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord, there are two odd couples. The first are roommates Abby and Marilyn at the Bristol Place Senior Living Facility. The second are the farce and melodrama compelled to cohabitate in an unsatisfying evening that is neither funny nor moving. The premise has potential. Two elderly women, one a supreme grump and […]
Review: Southern stereotypes get tested in Byhalia, Mississippi
For the South of Evan Linder’s play Byhalia, Mississippi, both the American flag and the Confederate one should be replaced by one reading “Bless This Mess.” It’s racist, classist, misogynist, and crude—but it’ll muddle through somehow. Can we forgive personal, historical, and political trespasses? That is the defining question. At one point, the heroine, Laurel […]
Review: A rousing silver anniversary for Step Afrika!
A quarter-century ago, C. Brian Williams, who’d honed his step-dancing skills as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha at Howard University, was visiting South Africa at the dawn of the Nelson Mandela presidency. Williams saw a boy on a roadside doing a step-like gumboot dance, the kind miners in that country developed to communicate with […]
Review: ‘A Bronx Tale’ Well Told at the National
“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” Lorenzo the bus driver tells his son, Calogero, in A Bronx Tale. There’s no wasted talent in the rock-solid touring production of the musical that swaggered into the National Theatre Tuesday night. A Bronx Tale has a tale of its own. It began as Chazz Palminteri’s autobiographical […]
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 […]
Testosterone-fueled Dein Perry’s Tap Dogs Bring Steel-tipped Beats from Down Under
The 1990s were a percussive decade. New York brought in ’da Noise and ’da Funk and Stomped even as the Blue Men thrumbed their melodic PVC tubes. Meanwhile, in Australia, steel fitter turned dance phenom Dein Perry unleashed his Tap Dogs. Almost a quarter-century later, the boot-clad lads from Down Under have come to mark […]
Ain’t Misbehavin’ review, a high-wattage Fats Waller power surge at Signature Theatre
If you’ve got a case of the polar-vortex blues, Signature Theatre has the prescription for you: a two-hour extended-release burst of high-wattage, endorphin-pumping rhythm, courtesy of one Fats Waller and friends in a rompin’ stompin’ Ain’t Misbehavin’. A tad overmannered in spots and too loudly mic’d on the vocals, especially on the treble end, the […]
Review: The Screwtape Letters. a handsome harangue
The Screwtape Letters, in a touring revival at the Lansburgh Theatre, is a polished, imaginative rendering of a tedious, self-righteous play. The acting and production values in this two-hander are excellent, but the script is a smug harangue. The play is adapted by Max McLean and Jeffrey Fiske from C.S. Lewis’s much-beloved epistolary novel, a […]
Matthew Bourne’s ‘Cinderella’: A masterful reimagining
Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Sunday, is brilliantly imagined and executed. Forget your Disney conceptions, or even the Rostislav Zakharov or Frederick Ashton ballet precursors to the same score by Sergei Prokofiev. Bourne and his New Adventures Company, in this revised version of his 1997 production, bring an idiosyncratic but deeply stirring […]
Review: Miss Saigon. A haunting production at the Kennedy Center
The Vietnam War ended 45 years ago, and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s Miss Saigon debuted almost 30 years ago, but the musical, in a riveting touring production at the Kennedy Center through January 13, feels utterly fresh. All too timely as well, with war and refugee crises making headlines from Myanmar, Syria, Afghanistan, South […]