What’s more seasonally entertaining than the country’s oldest continuing production of The Nutcracker? Sprucing it up with new finery that enhances the company’s fabulous performances. That’s what Ballet West did last year under Adam Sklute’s artistic direction. What’s marvelous is that the $3 million update was channeled not toward an overdose of digital dazzle but […]
Review: Billy Elliot at Signature Theatre
A country divided, tensions running high. That was Tuesday evening in America on midterm election night. It was also mid-1980s England in Signature Theatre’s production of Billy Elliot.
Anastasia: highly entertaining historical hooey
Pour Disney princess movies, Nicholas and Alexandra, Dr. Zhivago, Les Miz, Annie, My Fair Lady, and An American in Paris in a mixer, hit blend, and you’ll end up with Anastasia, a historically and narratively ludicrous yet handsome and beguiling family musical. It’s easy to see why the team that brought us the ambitious Ragtime […]
Bracing new works from San Francisco Ballet’s Unbound Festival
A meditation on the arc of a lifetime. A message piece about soul-eroding communication technology. A frenetic exploration of Jung’s notion of male and female psychic elements. Such was the heady fare in a bracing evening of new works from San Francisco Ballet Wednesday night at the Kennedy Center.
Review: Viva V.E.R.D.I – an otherworldly convergence of Verdi and Shakespeare
Giuseppe Verdi revered Shakespeare and wrote a Macbeth, an Otello, and a Falstaff. He longed to write a King Lear as well and even worked with two librettists toward that goal.
Review: South Pacific, enchanting and relevant
Was ever a message musical wrapped in such a luxurious bounty of romance? Those love songs! Seventy years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific still floors us with its lyricism.
Review: Shakespeare Theatre’s Romeo & Juliet boldly conceived, superbly performed
“These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder / Which, as they kiss, consume.” Friar Lawrence’s words ring pulse-quickeningly true in Shakespeare Theatre Company’s vibrant Romeo & Juliet, its sixth iteration of this timeless tale. Directed by Alan Paul, the company’s associate artistic director, the production also […]
Review: The Hypocrites’ hijinks with Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pinafore. Bring the kids.
I am generally not a forced gaiety and audience-participation kind of guy. And yet Saturday night, there I was some 20 minutes before show time for H.M.S. Pinafore, in Olney Theatre’s Mulitz-Gudelsky Theatre Lab, tossing little stuffed animals back and forth to unnervingly cheerful guitar and ukulele playing thespians clad in pajamas, as well as […]
Dance Review: Step Afrika!’s Soul-Stirring ‘Migration’
The painter Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Migration Series chronicles the exodus of more than six million African-Americans from the South to the North starting around 1916. The WPA-funded project was published in 1941 when he was 25. Step Afrika!, D.C.’s home-grown step dance company, takes spirited inspiration from these works in The Migration: Reflections on Jacob […]
Review: Ballet Nacional de Cuba performing Don Quixote
It was 40 years ago that the Ballet Nacional de Cuba made its U.S. debut at the Kennedy Center and 30 years ago that it premiered its production of Don Quixote. It was 70 years ago that Alicia Alonso founded the company bearing her name that would become the Ballet Nacional after the 1959 revolution. […]
Review: Saint Joan, a funky, spunky, stripped-down Shaw
Brevity is not the soul of Saint Joan’s wit. Even at three and a half hours’ running time, however, the George Bernard Shaw classic never flags in Bedlam’s funky, spunky, stripped down version at the Folger Theatre. There are, however, some costs to the company’s insistently low-cost approach.
The Kennedy Center’s 2018/2019 Dance Season
“I always think of our audience,” says Meg Booth, director of dance programming for the Kennedy Center. “There are always some attending their first performances, and subscribers of 20 and 30 years who have seen it all and want to be challenged.”