My sit-down with DC actor Sara Barker was delayed slightly as I had to field a call from my financial planner about some issue with retirement accounts. As I finally sat down to our late afternoon lunch in a Pentagon Row sushi bar, I couldn’t help but exclaim, “Financial planner? Retirement accounts? Good God, what […]
Emilie—La Marquise du Chatelet Defends Her Life Tonight (review)
Emilie is like a perfectly icy glass of champagne laced with bitters. Avant Bard’s scintillating production of Lauren Gunderson’s play about Enlightenment-era scientific genius and mistress of Voltaire (usually, the order is reversed so her affiliation with a famous man comes first) La Marquise du Chatelet—the Emilie of the title—sparkles with wit, intelligence and passion […]
WSC Avant Bard’s 2017-2018 Season
WSC Avant Bard will bring some familiar names into its three-production 2017-2018 season.
Avant Bard’s King Lear is revelatory, thanks to Rick Foucheux and director Tom Prewitt
Is it possible to learn something new from a 400-year-old play? Yes, if the play is rich in insight and wisdom; if the production is attentive to detail and willing to take risks; and if there is a commitment to excellence by the company. WSC Avant Bard’s King Lear succeeds on all three counts, and […]
Rick Foucheux is retiring. Here’s why he’s making his exit as King Lear at WSC Avant Bard
Behold the King. He is standing in front of a boiling, roiling thunderstorm (“Blow, wind! And crack your cheeks!”), beard laced with iron, wild hair crowned with an even wilder laurel (or perhaps it is a crown of thorns). Also, he is in his undershirt. (“An epic parent-child drama and then some,” the WSC Avant […]
The Gospel at Colonus, a hymn to the human experience (review)
“We are at Church; the Minister (William T. Newman, Jr.) is about to preach the Gospel of Oedipus at Colonus, in the final years of his star-crossed life. He is a human tank of a man; deep-voiced and resonant; his voice is crisp with authority but softened by the nature of the thing he is […]
TAME./Shrew Part Two: Shrew views and dangerous plays or what’s a theatre for?
Last week, we posted Part One of my talk with three local theatre-makers who have engaged Shakespeare’s troublesome early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. Jonelle Walker’s TAME. runs through December 11th at WSC Avant Bard.
Remembering DC actor/director Richard M. Mancini, whose memorial is this Sunday at Keegan
So many of the benchmarks from my almost forty years working in the small professional theatre scene in Washington, DC were shared with my dear friend Richard Mancini.
TAME./Shrew: Three women talk about facing the Bard’s troubling play head on
WSC Avant Bard is presenting a world premiere and critics have lavished praise on its playwright. “Jonelle Walker’s vivid, artfully unnerving TAME. is a retort to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew,” raved Celia Wren in The Washington Post. (The title of the play, by the way, is all caps and ends with a full-stop.) […]
Tame. Powerful Shrew re-do from Avant Bard (review)
Dark. Squirmy. Brutal. Galling. Backwards. Chilling. A slew of punchy, powerful words ran through my mind, much like the pithy (and punctuated) Tame. on Monday night, as I watched a man dominate a woman into a Christian-prescribed-submission.
My won’t-miss shows for this season
If you’re like me, you’ve already done your Christmas shopping, filled out your budget for the next fiscal year, and made arrangements for your final repose after The Event Which Awaits Us All occurs. Now it’s time for something much more difficult: planning your theater season.
Why I love and chose to produce The Good Devil
When I was a kid, I loved Saturday morning cartoons (of course), and the old Superman series, but most of all I loved the black-and-white films of physical comedians of yore—Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and W. C. Fields—who came of age during vaudeville and who sometimes struggled to reinvent their careers during the era […]