Jill Kyle-Keith

About Jill Kyle-Keith

Jill Kyle-Keith, age unknown, is the longtime owner and Queen of Beale Street Puppets in Baltimore, Maryland. Bravely hanging on to the idea that vaudeville will someday return and this Internet thing is just a fad, she has foolishly made her living in live entertainment for over thirty years. The end result is that she has seen hundreds, if not thousands, of live shows over the years and now feels qualified to offer her unasked-for opinions to an unsuspecting public.
And oh yeah, she has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and the DC Fringe in years past, and was awarded a "Best of Fringe" by The Scotsman newspaper and a distressingly bad review by some loser online for the DC show, which was gleefully posted by her on the theater door and resulted in all remaining shows selling out. Moral is: sure, good reviews are nice, but bad reviews are catnip to the curious.

Reflections of a critic on the closing days of DC Theatre Scene

December 28, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

Theater is at its best when it teaches us something. When it makes us think, and reconsider our stance on an issue, or when it carries us away into another land and time, where characters, fantastical though they may be, are essentially human and essentially ourselves. The mirror held up, as it were. This is […]

Review: A Very Pointless Digital Holiday Spectacular, just right for 2020 sendoff

December 18, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

You’ve got to hand it to Pointless Theatre- the above title alone is just about perfect for 2020, even if it started out as a simple twist on the company’s clever name. As we are all in need of a little pointless cheer these days, I must tell you that it cheers me no end […]

Review: Vato Tsikurishvili’s mysterious Joy! at Synetic

October 20, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

One would think that a show about joy would have little to do with theater- or much else, for that matter- these days. Yet Synetic Theater, that chameleon of invention, brings us little glimmers of joys past and joys to come. Their current online offering, Joy!, is really two separate one-person offerings. This reviewer was […]

Review: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), a fun riff at Chesapeake Shakespeare

March 11, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

The hefty tome of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, a nondescript table, two chairs and a turquoise feather boa is apparently all one needs to stage all of the Bard’s output: if you skip a few things. With The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), Chesapeake Shakespeare pulls a rabbit out of a tattered hat with […]

Review: Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers, a perfect marriage of script and production

February 27, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

There’s a saying among actors: “There’s no such thing as a perfect show.” Anyone lucky enough to see Theater J’s production of The Wanderers will have to politely disagree: top to bottom, this is as fine and perfect a piece of theater I’ve seen in many a year. The script by Anna Ziegler (whose play […]

Review: Thumbelina at Imagination Stage. Puppetry and design bring the tiny story to life

February 19, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

To children, the world is often a large and overbearing place. Think of how difficult it would be if each chair you sat in was three feet tall, the table even higher, and the doorknob impossibly out of reach. Hans Christian Andersen’s classic story of Thumbelina is not just a fairy tale, but a treatise […]

Review: Rocky Horror Show, Iron Crow’s annual raunchy, ridiculous treat

February 10, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

For those of you who have been living under a rock or putting up moose jerky with the Doomsday Preppers these last few years, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is that ages-old, ever-young cult musical movie of weirdness starring the legendary Tim Curry as Dr Frank ‘N’ Furter. Iron Crow Theatre, celebrating its tenth year, […]

Review: Kinky Boots kicks up its 6″ heels at Toby’s

January 24, 2020 by Jill Kyle-Keith

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: Jersey Boys tour adds a holiday gift to their show at The National

December 23, 2019 by Jill Kyle-Keith

Some music gets inside your head and stays there. Think “Sherry”, “Big Girls Don’t Cry”, “My Eyes Adored You”. It’s pretty much a guarantee you can at least hum at least one of these. After all, you’ve been hearing them on the radio since the early 1960s. That’s because the music of Frankie Valli and […]

Review: The Jungle Book, a new musical written for Creative Cauldron’s young cast

November 12, 2019 by Jill Kyle-Keith

The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is the quintessential coming-of-age story: Mowgli, a human infant, is found alone in the jungle by the Wolf Pack- and adopted by the animals. As he matures, he begins to understand that though the wolves are family, humans are family, too. Torn between them, he must battle Sher Khan, […]

Review: Dracula at Chesapeake Shakespeare

October 17, 2019 by Jill Kyle-Keith

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 […]

Review: Helen on Wheels. Comedy is hard.

September 16, 2019 by Jill Kyle-Keith

Best Medicine Rep stands out among our newer small theatre companies for location (a store space on the upper level of Lakeforest Mall in Gaithersburg) and for mission: they will only present comedies. Laughter, after all, being the best medicine. It’s a commendable mission. Comedy writers get to showcase for their works, while local folks […]