In David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord, there are two odd couples. The first are roommates Abby and Marilyn at the Bristol Place Senior Living Facility. The second are the farce and melodrama compelled to cohabitate in an unsatisfying evening that is neither funny nor moving. The premise has potential. Two elderly women, one a supreme grump and […]

“In the end, we’re all just taller children,” croons Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Elizabeth Ziman on her band, Elizabeth & The Catapult’s, aptly title 2009 song, “Taller Children.” This is the lyric that immediately sprang to mind as I watched Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage unspool in front of me at the Keegan Theatre—a finely designed and […]

Spring in Washington DC opens up with a ground-breaking world premiere play, From Gumbo to Mumbo presented by  Keegan Theatre’s PLAY-RAH-KA Series. It’s a Live Narrative performed by two award-winning Spoken Word artists and educators: Drew Anderson and Dwayne Lawson-Brown who’ve dedicated their lives to the edification of young school students: enlivening their learning experience […]

My sister asked me what play I was going to see as we wrapped up our phone call. “Oh, it’s a musical about one of those contests where people stand around a truck and the last person who takes their hands off it wins the truck,” I said. “Wait…that’s a musical?” was her response. Sure, […]

Writers excavate the marrow of life in order to create their fictional universes, and thus are sometimes required to mine their own marrow for their art. So it was with Paula Vogel, who lost her brother Carl — a witty, sophisticated and elegant gentleman, to judge from the instructions he left for his obsequies (set […]

If you like your Christmas holiday fare free of treacle then this is the show for you. No annoyingly twee children shouting out carols in bad English accents and no sticky sugar plums to get stuck in the teeth. It’s Scrooge meets his past, present, and future on barstools. The Irish pub becomes purgatory and […]

As the cast dances in the aisles of Keegan Theatre, it’s difficult not to catch the contagious, rose-colored energy from this musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It  by Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery. I left bobbing to a handful of upbeat songs playing on repeat in my head. And with several somber, but just […]

We often imagine Lincoln to have been an amiable, principled man, worn down by war and illness. Perhaps his own and, certainly, that of his sons and wife. Which is why Brandon McCoy’s Francis makes such a great facsimile of our American Hero. He is congenial. Concerned with the well-being of others. A great speaker […]

Sometimes it is just easiest to say it up front as clearly as possible: I loved The Ice Child—an old-school-esque “once upon a time” fairy tale about very real-world, right now issues that treats its tiny audience like intelligent, independent beings capable of great empathy. And imagination.