High school musicals are hot right now, with Broadway hosting everything from the biting Mean Girls to the heart-warming The Prom to the phenomenon Dear Evan Hansen to the zany Be More Chill in the past few months alone. So it’s not exactly surprising that someone thought it was time to bring back Footloose, the […]
Review: Paquita from The Mariinsky Ballet, rarely produced and newly conceived
The Mariinksy Ballet marks its annual appearance at the Kennedy Center this week with an unusual offering: a full-length three-act Paquita, a ballet that is rarely performed in its entirety. While it is worth seeing for that reason alone, this production fuses new and historic choreography in interesting ways. Most ballet audiences have seen the […]
Review: Merce Cunningham at 100. The choreographer’s pioneering spirit lives on
Eleven dancers in white unitards with horizontal black strips at the top extending to gloved hands. In a dawn of pastel light, they hold a marvelous stillness. Four musicians play a minimalist John Cage score with a fragile, simple, ever-so-slow piano line and occasional extended single-high-pitch violin notes over the cascading micro-percussive tumbles of a […]
Review: The Improvised Shakespeare Company. Ridiculous. Silly. Delightful.
Five men, three chairs, and 75 minutes of improv set in the world of the Bard. That’s the simple premise of The Improvised Shakespeare Company. But the payoff is so much more. At the Kennedy Center on Tuesday, the skilled improvisers treated the audience to a laugh-out-loud war farce cooked up on the spot, with […]
Review: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, the Cronut of musicals, still works its spell
Recent research has shown that humans’ domestication of dogs has altered canines’ brains. I have a theory — it has not yet been borne out by science, but I am confident that it will be — that cats have done the same to humans. Why else would we be in such devoted service to these […]
Review: What the Constitution Means to Me disarms all the arguing and in-fighting
Washington, DC, is one of the few cities in the country where it’s not uncommon for large groups of people to come together to spend two hours deep in conversation about the constitution and its relevance to the modern world on a Friday night. Rarely, however, are these prosaic gatherings of politicos and pundits anywhere […]
Opening day of The REACH at The Kennedy Center
Under a bright, perfect-weather-for-DC day, crowds, volunteers, donors and celebs gathered to celebrate a new addition to a Washington landmark. The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts’ The REACH opened on September 7th to the public with a 16 day festival that includes music, arts education sessions, dance classes, and the Kennedy Center’s most […]
Take-With Guide to the Page to Stage New Play Festival, Labor Day Weekend
Because schedules for the Page-to-Stage Festival can be difficult to find when you arrive at The Kennedy Center, we offer this printable guide. Keys: Locations (AR) African Room – Opera House; (AT) Atrium; (BR) Bird Room – Concert Hall; (CH) Concert Hall; (CL) Chinese Lounge; (FT) Family Theater; (HON) Hall of Nations; (IL) Israeli Lounge […]
Review: Dear Evan Hansen, stunning performances led by Ben Levi Ross
Dear Evan Hansen is a heart-wrenching, ultimately transformative, gut-punch of a musical. The Kennedy Center’s production, directed by Michael Greif and featuring the national touring cast, including the utterly stunning Ben Levi Ross as Evan, is the most intimate, emotionally wrought performance of the show I have yet to see. Evan, a painfully shy, socially […]
Review: Disney’s Aladdin. It’s all about the spectacle and Major Attaway as Genie
“It’s the plot that you knew/ with a small twist or two/ but the changes we made were slight,” croons Major Attaway as the Genie in the finale of Aladdin national tour, now at the Kennedy Center. This not-quite-apology acknowledgment of the awkward tension between the nostalgia that drives a ticket purchase (in this case […]
Review: The Band’s Visit at The Kennedy Center
The Band’s Visit shows why it’s a multiple Tony Award winner in its stop at The Kennedy Center and is a welcoming respite from the big-bigger-biggest splashiness of a typical Broadway musical. It’s a show that grabs your heart with the most unlikely thing in the world of showbiz: economy of means. Plot line, staging, […]
Review: Second City’s America; It’s Complicated. Politics and humor blended masterfully
The new Second City comedy show, America; It’s Complicated, takes aim at liberals, conservatives, and independents, leaving the audience exhausted from laughter while perhaps noodling a few lessons on their way home. Doing what Second City does best, the show mixes sketch comedy, a few songs, improv, and some audience participation to weave together a […]
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