When HBO and Comedy Central’s Lauren Weedman decided to take her comedic sensibilities to the jailhouse and teach a writing workshop, her good intentions were tinged with a sense of noblesse oblige, as Weedman herself would be the first to admit. But we all know where good intentions lead. Rather than teach a writing course, Weedman winds […]
Norman
It isn’t often that a production will justify a reviewer’s use of the delightful word “pixilated,” especially as a homonym. That said, if ever there was a time, it is now. In Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon’s utterly transfixing and transporting 4D tribute to Scots-Canadian pioneer filmmaker Norman McLaren, here for a brief three-day engagement […]
Lungs
Feeling a bit overwhelmed by some of the magnificent productions on DC theater boards, their elegant sets and colorful costumes either enhancing or competing with the luscious language emanating from lushly made-up mouths of too many characters to count without a playbook? If so, does Studio Theatre have a play for you.
The Green Bird
Fairy tales and philosophy should make for strange bedfellows, and, at least in theory, even stranger bedtime stories. But in Constellation Theatre Company’s wondrous production of the 18th-century Italian playwright Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird, the two cozy up with remarkable affinity. Like all good relationships, they also bring things out in each other that […]
Magnificent Waste
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. While those ominous words may not hang above Flashpoint’s door, Dante would recognize this place. Cautiously making our way around the darkened room — the seats are roped off with black ribbon — accompanied by a jazzy score with otherworldly tones, we are both beckoned and repelled by […]
Fragments
Say the name Samuel Beckett, and most people think: Waiting for Godot, existentialism. Theatre of the absurd, where absurd means meaningless. As we watch Peter Brook and Marie Hélène Estienne’s spare but striking staging of five uneasy pieces by the late Irish playwright, the word also takes on its more everyday meaning. And we realize […]
Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending
Fresh from winning both Best Overall Show and Audience Choice Best Comedy at this summer’s Pick of the Fringe Awards, Romeo and Juliet: Choose Your Own Ending is back with both a bang and a whimper, courtesy of two characters who in the original are relatively minor. Here they come forcefully into their own, in […]
The War of the Worlds
The “terrifying broadcast that panicked a nation!” the night before Halloween more than 70 years ago and sent thousands heading for the hills can now be not only heard, but seen. Scena Theatre has taken the Orson Welles Mercury Theater’s (almost literally) groundbreaking “The War of the Worlds,” based on the eponymous 1898 book by […]
The Little Prince
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” These words, penned (in French) during the Second World War by writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, will immediately ring a bell with children of all ages and nationalities.
The Comedy of Errors … at Colonus?
If only your reviewer wrote as rapidly as Lumina’s astoundingly accomplished young performers declaim poetry, verse (and reverse) and verbal pyrotechnics by, and in the manner of Sophocles and Shakespeare, this review would be a stream-of-consciousness critique chock-a-block with tropes,
The Seven Ages of Mime
Happenstance Theatre’s The Seven Ages of Mime plies the ancient art in an hour of poetic silence, laugh-out-loud slapstick and historical storytelling.
Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell
delivers in both senses of the word, taking playgoers on a wild and enchanting ride through the vast and venerable history of the original performance art.
Sit Down, Stand Up! The Story of the Student Sit-ins
Sit Down, Stand Up! a play about the student lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, NC delivers a message in history and humanity gets plenty of enthusiastic audience participation.