Washington DC

Dangereuse: An interview with Nigel Rowe, a cabaret star as Ariel in IN Series’ ‘Stormy Weather’

IN Series’ Stormy Weather, inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, features the music of Billie Holiday and a stunning cabaret performance by Nigel Rowe as Ariel. In the new Sybil Williams play,...

Shakespeare Theater Company’s ‘Everybody’ flirts with death, but falls short of greatness

There’s really only one thing that all of us – that everybody – has in common. Death, whether we’re ready or not, will come for us. All our failures and triumphs, our relationships and desires, can...

Constellation’s ‘Little Shop’ puts the horror back in horticulture

From its beginnings as a very low-budget 1960 Roger Corman B-picture horror flick (a young Jack Nicholson had a minor role), Little Shop of Horrors has been an irresistible salad of corrupted...

Slapstick is served with ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ by Vienna Theatre Company

One Man, Two Guvnors, written by Richard Bean and directed at Vienna Theatre Company by Eric Storck, is aggressively funny stuff. Played as big as possible, each character pays homage to Commedia...

Teatro de la Luna highlights the soul of Tango music and dance

If you’re not ready to give in to an autumnal chill in the air, one of the hottest places to be right now is decidedly Teatro de la Luna. In its Friday night series, Noche de Luna: Tango Show, the...

‘The Haunting of Hill House’ delivers insidious, subtle terror this Halloween

The Little Theatre of Alexandria presents The Haunting of Hill House, inspired by the novel by Shirley Jackson and adapted for the stage by F. Andrew Leslie. Maggie Mumford directs a talented ensemble...

IN Series’ ‘Stormy Weather’ provides an original take on Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ with Billie Holiday as musical fuel

Ingenious. Shakespeare’s venerable, often un-provocatively produced The Tempest has been reconstructed into theater with an invigorating musical arc and an awakening narrative bite. It has been...

‘Mozart Celebration’ Opens Season at the National Chamber Ensemble

The National Chamber Ensemble’s 2019 – 2020 season launched this past Saturday with Mozart Celebration, which featured several of the composer’s beloved works. Mozart is one of those composers who was...

‘The Last Night of Ballyhoo’ educates and entertains at Bowie Community Theatre

Who is a Jew? Will you go with me to the Ballyhoo ball? Those are two questions the Jewish upper-middle-class Freitag family kvetch about during the happenings of playwright Alfred Uhry’s The Last...

Review: ‘Nat King Cole at 100’ at the Kennedy Center

A panoply of performers graced the stage last night to honor the extraordinary musician, composer, and civil rights activist Nat King Cole, who would have been 100 years old this past March 17....

‘Mystery Science Theater 3000 Live: The Great Cheesy Movie Circus Tour’ Makes One-Weekend Stop at The National Theatre

A cult favorite TV show created in the ’80s, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3) has left your screens and found its way to the DC stage for one weekend and one weekend only. The weird (I mean that as...

ARTSFAIRFAX presents 2019 Emerging Arts Award to NextStop Theatre Company

ARTSFAIRFAX presented its 2019 Emerging Arts Award at its eighth Arts Awards event on October 18, 2019. The award was given to the professional, black box NextStop Theatre Company. The ARTSFAIRFAX...

Prince William Little Theatre brings difficult history and ethical questions to the stage in ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’

Prince William Little Theatre has chosen some heavy material for their recent show. Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Harry Kantrovich, focuses on the international military tribunals that were a...

Mischief and depth: Professor Gerald C. Wood on Conor McPherson and ‘Port Authority’

Gerald C. Wood is an author and expert on the brilliant Irish playwright and filmmaker Conor McPherson. Wood is Professor and Chair of English at Carson-Newman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee. In...

Rorschach Theatre remounts and reimagines ‘She Kills Monsters’ at the Atlas

A much-needed rabbit hole to explore is opening in the DMV. Let us rejoice. It is the return of She Kills Monsters some five years after making its first appearance, thanks to Rorschach Theatre....

The power of subversive design in ‘Day of Absence’ at Theater Alliance (Magic Time!)

To realize how much white America loved minstrelsy is a reckoning painful or shameful, depending on one’s ancestry. Minstrel shows were never meant for people of African descent to see; they were...

A Dramatic ‘Tosca’ Mesmerizes, Enchants at the Virginia Opera

The dawn of the 1800s saw a Rome in turmoil. Napoleon Bonaparte spun a soured campaign in Egypt into a public relations success story, securing his legacy as a folk hero and launching a coup d’etat...

Tickets for ‘The Last Ship’ starring Sting at the National Theatre go on sale this Friday

Tickets for Sting’s acclaimed musical THE LAST SHIP, starring and featuring original music and lyrics by 17-time Grammy Award®-winner Sting, will go on sale Friday, October 18 at 10am for its...

An Afternoon With Clarinetist Paquito D’Rivera and the Harlem Quartet at the Phillips Collection

For decades, the Sunday afternoon concert series at the Phillips Collection has maintained primacy of place in Washington’s classical musical firmament. But like leaders in all fields who want to...

‘The 39 Steps’ by the St. Mark’s Players is a delightfully crafty, if uneven production

First things first for those expecting an honest adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 spy thriller of the same name. This latest production by the St. Mark’s Players might benefit from a...

A musical job unlike any other: A talk with Angel Gil-Ordóñez of the PostClassical Ensemble

Correctly predicting what kind of serious art music would and would not be presented on American concert stages in 2019 would have fooled – even baffled – the most prescient of musical observers from...

Crashing the Party: Pink Martini Celebrates 25 Years With a Kennedy Center Blowout

If the invitation would have been to see the genre-bending Portland-based cabaret-style self-described ‘little orchestra,’ Pink Martini, featuring China Forbes with special guest star Meow Meow, that...

Theater and Policy Salon’s 2019-2020 season kicks off this weekend

The 2019-2020 Theater and Policy Salon season will start on October 18 at 3 pm with a Salon at New York University’s Washington DC campus at 1307 L Street, NW in downtown DC. The conversation will...

Prologue Theatre’s ‘Dog Sees God’ Guaranteed to Get You Talking

Now in its second season, Prologue Theatre’s mission is simple: They want to start conversations. They will undoubtedly accomplish this with their take on Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage...

Creative Cauldron announces “Bold New Musical Voices” competition for women composers and writers

Creative Cauldron announces an open call for submissions for its new “Bold New Musical Voices” Festival, to be held from April 27 – May 6, 2020. The festival seeks new and innovative musical works by...

U.S. premiere of ‘White Pearl’ by Anchuli Felicia King to premiere at Studio Theatre

In her U.S. premiere, rising Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King takes a scathing look at the ugliness of the beauty industry in White Pearl, beginning November 6, 2019, at Studio Theatre...

Review: India.Arie at Strathmore Music Center

India.Arie is music therapy for the soul – part mindfulness meditation through song and part groove-funk to keep it real. Authenticity is her brand essence, but her performance is much more than a...

Review: Theater Alliance’s ‘Day of Absence’ by Douglas Turner Ward

Two clowns open a suitcase. In that suitcase lies a rope. A long rope. They start to play with it, tug-of-war stuff, with the loser pretending he’s winning. Lotsa yuks. Then the twist. And the painful...

Review: ‘Broadway Center Stage: Footloose’ at The Kennedy Center

Footloose, the 1984 movie starring everybody’s friend, Kevin Bacon, was a hit for many reasons, but one stood out over the others: dancing means life, and dancing gives meaning to life. This...

Review: The Mariinsky Ballet’s ‘Paquita’ at the Kennedy Center

Ballet, like opera, has a love-hate relationship with its 19th-century repertoire. Contrived plots, truly embarrassing cultural stereotypes, crowd-pleasing but horribly dated choreography that simply...

Internationally Acclaimed Cellist Amit Peled to Perform Free Concert

Internationally acclaimed cellist Amit Peled joins Peabody Conservatory alumna Allison Freeman for a free concert this Sunday, October 13, 2019, at 4:30pm at St. Edward the Confessor Church in Bowie,...

Review: Jimmy Buffett’s ‘Escape to Margaritaville’ at The National Theatre

Four years ago, I walked into what was then the Barnes & Noble in downtown Bethesda and asked for a sales clerk’s assistance locating one of Jimmy Buffett’s greatest hits CDs. She was stymied. Would...

Appropriate or Appropriation? PostClassical Ensemble and The Lakota Music Project Frames Debate on Indigenous Music

If this summer’s Baltimore Symphony Orchestra labor dispute underscored that remonstrating over the sustainability of American symphony orchestras is pointless if we don’t clarify whether they should...

Storm Large Is in Charge at AMP by Strathmore

Ah, an evening of cabaret in an intimate venue in the swanky Pike and Rose complex. Elegant artists dressed to the nines singing and playing sophisticated classics from the Great American Songbook...

A Personal View of the Coming Apocalypse: Caryl Churchill’s ‘Escaped Alone’

What a play! Escaped Alone is full of dramatic presentations announcing a coming apocalypse; an end of days. The production at Signature Theatre is receiving rightful praise (read my colleague Barbara...

Review: ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar Show’ at Imagination Stage

Shadow puppets, sock puppets, masked performances, large scale festival puppets, and marionettes appear in cultures around the world. Enduring over the centuries, puppetry is an art, in multiple...

Review: ‘Carrie, The Musical’ at Workhouse Arts Center

It’s that time of year again, when there’s a bit of Pumpkin Spice in everything and Halloween themes are taking over. The Workhouse Arts Center is doing its part to add a bit of horror into the air...

Review: ‘All That Jazz!’ at Annapolis Shakespeare Company

All That Jazz! at Annapolis Shakespeare Company is an original musical revue of classic songs from old Broadway shows, in collaboration with Unified Jazz Ensemble. Conceived and directed by Sally...

Review: ‘Disenchanted’ at Creative Cauldron

Snow White is bossy. Cinderella is a ditzy dim bulb. Sleeping Beauty not only sleeps a lot but snores. Belle is going nuts from talking to inanimate objects. Mulan likes girls. Just what kind of...

A Wild Tale Wags ‘My Barking Dog’ at Caos on F

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Review: ‘Escaped Alone’ at Signature Theatre

British playwright Caryl Churchill is a revolutionary playwright. In her career, she has upset theatrical expectations many times over. She plays with gender and fools with time. She invents unusual...

Review: ‘And Then There Were None’ by Providence Players of Fairfax

Providence Players of Fairfax present Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, based on her book of the same name. By one of the world’s most decorated crime writers, And Then There Were None...

Review: ‘Pride and Prejudice’ at NextStop Theatre Company

Love is a game—or deadly serious—or both at once, depending on which character you ask in NextStop Theatre Company’s production of Pride and Prejudice. The game motif is evident early on, as the cast...

Review: ‘The Winter’s Tale’ by The Wheel Theatre Company

Suddenly and immovably convinced his wife has been unfaithful, a jealous king’s actions result in the death of his queen and son, the abandonment of his infant daughter, and a cheery start to The...

Magic Time!: A #MeToo Memory Animates ‘I Am Her’

Midway through this taut, fraught drama about sexual trauma, a woman named Ana, a wife and young mother, is suddenly triggered. We are not told exactly why. It might be the Kavanaugh hearings...

Review: ‘Merce Cunningham at 100, Beach Birds and BIPED’ at the Kennedy Center

What a pleasure to celebrate the centenary of modern dance master Merce Cunningham with a pair of works that demonstrates his formidable vision for dance, imbued with clarity of form and generosity of...

Review: ‘West by God’ at The Keegan Theatre

The economic and social plight of America’s white rural working class has been the subject of recent blockbuster books from J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy to Educated, by Tara Westover. Now this...

Review: ‘Fences’ at Ford’s Theatre

As seen through the simple symbolism of a wooden fence, Ford’s Theatre’s season opener of August Wilson’s Fences is a brilliant and searing exploration of the tragi-conflicts and heroic triumphs of...

Highwood Theatre Founder Fired Amid Accusations of Criminal Conduct Against Minors

On Friday, September 26, 2019, Washington City Paper reported on serious allegations facing the former executive director and founder of the Highwood Theatre, a children’s theater company based in...

‘My Barking Dog’ Explores Wildness and Uncertainty at Caos on F

Building on its mission to produce “exciting yet profound theatre in greater Washington, DC” The Edge of the Universe Players 2 is presenting My Barking Dog, a play about “A woman. A man. A wild...