Altar Boyz is a silly, raucous romp of a show with good intentions and even better execution. If great direction, flash dancing and pelvic thrusting urban choreography would get us through the Pearly Gates, then the Altar Boyz would high step their way in with bumps and grinds to spare.
The Santaland Diaries
Most holiday shows, like holiday kids, turn out to be Naughty or Nice. In the Nice corner are those bright, cheery classics about love, family, and generosity that bring comfort to all ages. In the Naughty corner are your gritty, grinchy adult entertainments, populated by jaded singles, barflies, and bad Santas. Neither sort traffics in […]
Seasonal Disorder
If writing and performing a scripted comedy is tricky – and it is – imagine how difficult it is to be part of a team that must pull laugh-making material out of thin air on demand from its audience.
Michael Stebbins on directing Barrie’s ghost story Mary Rose
Michael Stebbins had to grow up, but lately he’s been thinking about the boy who never did. Peter Pan’s undying, almost mythic legacy led Stebbins, the Producing Artistic Director at Rep Stage, to read more deeply into the works of J. M. Barrie. It was here that he discovered Mary Rose, a chilling and powerful […]
The Magic Flute
Mozart’s Magic Flute at The Puppet Company is as engaging and expressive as it gets for full family fun and entertainment. The story is true to the original with the major songs and arias in tact and colorful characters who bring you into the story.
A personal tribute to poet and lyricist Fran Landesman (1927 – 2011)
Lyricist Fran Landesman started with “Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most” and the Broadway musical The Nervous Set. Then turned her life into songs. Here’s how our lives intersected.
What’s in the oven, Page to Stage Monday
It is easy to think now, nearly a half-century after his time, that Jack Kennedy was a patron of the arts. This big building bears his name, and carries an enormous Robert Berks sculpture of his head in its Millennium Foyer. The gift shop is full of his biographies, and of accounts of his short […]
What’s in the oven, Page to Stage Festival Sunday
We yoke celebrity to money, as easily as we match athletic accomplishment to endorsement contracts, or to designer steroids. Thus it is hard to imagine a celebrated person who is not rich. But in the land of theater our instincts play us false. Our instincts, as we tread the marbled halls of the Kennedy Center, […]
What’s in the Oven: Page to Stage Saturday
Washington’s Page-to-Stage Festival at the Kennedy Center A meal is best savored when it is first observed cooking in the pan, giving up its aromatic perfumes to its expectant consumers as a gift and a tease. And when a mother is with child, her other children will gather round her and put their ears to […]
Fortier, Lane make Elephant Man fly at Olney Theatre
The Olney Theatre Center does a brave thing in taking on The Elephant Man, a beautiful, seductive, dangerous play…and thanks to stunning performances in the two principal roles and savvy directing, the gamble succeeds.
Beginnings at Meat and Potato Theatre
In the beginning God created puppets and the puppets were very, very cool. It came to pass that God wanted the puppets to tell us some really great little stories — so God created Meat and Potato Theatre. Stopping by the Playbill Cafe on a Sunday afternoon for a light lunch is a pleasant experience […]
Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune
“Frankie and Johnny were lovers,” so goes the familiar ballad, and so goes the play by Terrence McNally where a short order cook and waitress connect for an overnight romp of intimacy, exploration, and discovery. The sex comes at you first, before the lights come up, before a word is spoken–the familiar sounds of panting, […]