Once you meet Vera Stark you can’t forget her. The title character of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s 2009 masterwork By the Way, Meet Vera Stark has been lost to the ages—and we are the poorer for it. Smart, talented, determined and with a face that played courtesan to the camera, Vera Stark (an incandescent […]
Making a theatrical trailer: a talk about Everyman’s The Dresser
For DC area theatres, using movie-style trailers to promote upcoming productions is a fairly recent phenomenon. A few years ago, these promo videos consisted of still images with music underscoring. Not anymore. If we were handing out awards for most effective theatrical trailer, mine would go to Everyman Theatre for The Dresser which was released […]
The Dresser
Most adults can dress themselves, and so when we hear these days that someone has been engaged as a dresser by a theater company we assume that his job is principally to assist cast members who need to change costumes quickly and get back on to the stage. It was not always that way, though.
Crimes of the Heart
Everybody needs a sister. Whether by blood or a sister from another mister, we need someone who drives us crazy, who knows us better than we know ourselves, who criticizes us but will cut the first person who dares to insult her fellow sibling.
Red
In a time where kvetching over the Kardashians passes for civil discourse, it is bracing to watch a play like Red that depicts genuine intellectual arguments and two men passionately arguing about art—as if it really matters.
The Glass Menagerie
Just when you think you don’t have it in you to see a classic play for the bazillionth time and you clump to your seat thinking that it is too dang nice out to sit in the dark for nearly three hours and that the Orioles really need your support, something happens. A set by […]
A feathery, frolicksome Beaux’ Stratagem at Everyman
Restoration comedy or a leg of lamb jammed up my nose? Tough choice. With that personal disclosure out of the way, in spite of my bias, Everyman’s production of The Beaux’ Stratagem is feathery, frolicsome amusement, as refreshing as an ice cream soda mit schlag on a humid June afternoon.
Topdog/Underdog, searing commentary at Everyman
Something shocking happens at the end of Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog, now making its Baltimore premiere at Everyman Theatre, that is so shocking, it colors one’s memory of the entire play. What, at first, starts off as a rousing comic drama makes a conversion to searing social commentary, all in the span of […]
God of Carnage
“What ever happened to class?” laments lethal flapper Velma Kelly and prison matron Mama Morton in the song “Class” from the Kander and Ebb musical Chicago. You won’t find evidence of anything remotely classy—other than the décor—in Yasmina Reza’s play God of Carnage, which depicts two upscale Manhattan couples duking it out over their children’s […]
August: Osage County
A gorgeous new space deserves an equally stunning production. Everyman Theatre has pulled off this challenging feat with its sparkling renovation of the old Town Theater movie palace and its shattering and laugh-out-loud staging of playwright Tracy Letts’ mama drama August: Osage County.
Time Stands Still
Some things just can’t be put in a frame. Intimacy, for example, or the messiness of normal life. After a devastating bomb injury in Iraq, war photographer Sarah Goodwin (Beth Hylton) is forced to come out from behind the lens in Donald Marguiles’ searing drama Time Stands Still.
You Can’t Take It With You
You think your family’s crazy? Compared to the purposefully pixilated Sycamore-Vanderhof clan — the characters, and I mean characters, populating George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s exuberant comedy You Can’t Take It With You — your relatives probably err on the side of prosaic. You get to hang out with these eccentric lovelies for nearly three, […]