As this year closes, perhaps you, like we, are thinking back over your own year spent watching the various riches spread before us by Washington area theatres. I asked our staff for their most vivid memories. We hope you will share your own as comments for us all to savor.
Hispanic theatre thrives at GALA. Best productions of 2016
The following plays are my favorite selections best Hispanic productions of 2016, all seen at GALA Hispanic Theatre, and dominated by GALA productions themselves.
Volcanoes: Tales from El Salvador, a bilingual musical for children (review)
A trio of howling Cadejos, mythical doglike beings played by actors wearing jingling ankle and wrist bells, romp around GALA’s stage as lively piped-in Salvadoran music comes from overhead speakers. The beings perform cartwheels and somersaults and jump on a bed where Rosita, played by Melissa Strova Valencia, lies sleeping.
Cervantes:El último Quixote / Cervantes:The Last Quixote (review)
Nothing but the bare essentials for this multi-leveled, rich play, as staged by José Luis Arellano Garcia from Madrid, Spain. It’s his signature style, that won recognition with a 2016 Helen Hayes Award for director for Outstanding Direction for Yerma at GALA. The set design by Silvia de Marta is disarming. Three upstage doors reveal […]
Exploring Cervantes. Director José Arellano Garcia talks about The Last Quixote
In spite of severe thunderstorm and flash flood warnings, heat advisories to stay inside, and Metro track delays, we met at the front door of the GALA Hispanic Tivoli Theatre. Stage director José Luis Arellano Garcia arrived riding a bicycle. Dubraska Vale, GALA’s public relations associate, appeared on 14th Street NW, walking from the GALA […]
El Paso Blue at GALA Hispanic Theatre (review)
El Paso Blue by Hispanic playwright Octavio Solís, now making its East Coast debut at the GALA Hispanic Theatre, is a bilingual tribute to Spanglish, (with no surtitles), to the painful journey of cultural assimilation. It is wonderfully ironic that it’s written and performed mostly in English.
Chronicle of a Death Foretold at GALA Hispanic Theatre (review)
In this mesmerizing, dreamlike, must-see GALA adaptation by Jorge Alí Triana of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’ masterpiece novella, Chronicle of a Death Foretold/Crónica de una muerte anunciada, one hour and fifteen minutes feels as if we live through several lifetimes of human experience.
El mundo es un pañuelo / The World is a Handkerchief (review)
What happens when you accept all the different colors in the world as equal and beautiful? You get a rainbow. In this delightful, droll allegory set to music, El Mundo es un pañuelo/The World is a Handkerchief, Chilean playwright Jorge Díaz, shows us the joy of diversity.
GALA’s Señorita y Madame: The Secret War of Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein (review)
Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott thrusts us into a 1960’s press conference. Two iconic feminists, obsessed with eternal youth, anti-ageing makeover creams and Marketing, with a capital M, are near the end of their lives.
GALA celebrates Three Kings Day/ Fiesta de los Tres Reyes Magos
On Sunday, January 3rd, this was where it was at– with the young people, inside the Tivoli Theatre, kids and their parents wearing crowns of shiny red, green and silver, and packed the house. (Even the security guard was wearing a crown.) On stage, news anchor from News Channel 8, Alejandro Negrón, who served as […]
Rosalind Lacy’s Top 12 shows of 2015
Hispanic theatre bonds me to my family heritage. I was born in Los Angeles, California, with Latino roots that date back to Spain through the American southwest. I grew up in a decade on the brink of the Civil Rights movement in America. It was a time when it wasn’t cool to be Spanish or […]
New Adventures of Don Quixote/Nuevas Aventuras de Don Quijote at GALA (review)
“Is that the real Don Quixote?” whispers one awe-struck, five-year-old boy sitting near me in the GALA Hispanic Theatre, as helmeted actor Roberto Colmenares, gallantly flaunting shield and lance, makes his first entrance down the right aisle.