Washington DC

Review: “14” by Theatre Prometheus

Arresting, provocative, and hauntingly relevant, 14 by playwright José Casas weaves a tale of sixteen characters living or born in Arizona who express their divergent views about immigrants and...

Magic Time!: 10 Questions for the Brains Behind ‘The Tarot Reading’

Even in this theater town abounding in innovation, The Tarot Reading stands out as an original. I can’t think of anything it’s quite like. After I saw an iteration last year (The Tarot Reading IV), I...

Review: ‘Steel Magnolias’ at Sterling Playmakers

So many stories can be started with “boy meets girl.” It’s a trope that almost clutters literature – and drama for that matter. Even in shows with almost exclusively off-stage men, they are often the...

Review: Broadway Center Stage: ‘The Who’s Tommy’ at Kennedy Center

Fifty years ago Rolling Stone reported completion of a new album by Pete Townshend and called it “probably the most important milestone in pop since Beatlemania. For the first time, a rock group has...

Nu Sass To Perform ‘Marx in Soho’ at Edinburgh Fringe Festival

DC-based theater company Nu Sass Productions is taking Marx in Soho to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer. Marx in Soho, by American Historian Howard Zinn, will feature Mary Myers as Karl Marx...

‘Love’s Labor’s Lost’ Director Vivienne Benesch Finds Inspiration in Folger Reading Room

Actor, director, and administrator Vivienne Benesch has many credits to her name. She is the Producing Artistic Director of the PlayMakers Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. For twelve...

Review: ‘STOMP’ at the National Theatre

Started by Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1991, STOMP is a cacophony of sounds produced by common objects in lieu of musical instruments. An amalgam of music, dance,...

Woolly Mammoth Announces Its 2019-2020 Season

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company announces its 2019-2020 season, which features an energizing array of plays by new voices and Woolly veterans. The premiere season curated by Artistic Director María...

Review: ‘Ripcord’ by Vienna Theatre Company

Vienna Theatre Company has just opened David Lindsay-Abaire’s hilarious play, Ripcord, for the last production of their current season. The show takes place in an assisted living facility, with two...

Magic Time!: Disrupting the White Comfort Zone: A Q&A about ‘P.Y.G.’ at Studio Theatre

I have an ongoing interest in how theaters in DC with predominantly white audiences raise and represent the issue of race. And one of the things I’ve been noticing is how the white comfort zone...

Review: ‘Black Pearl Sings!’ At Alliance for New Music-Theatre

Black Pearl Sings! by Frank Higgins, at Alliance for New Music-Theatre, is an absorbing production with an uplifting message. This witty play was successfully produced here in 2016 at MetroStage,...

Interview: Violinist Yevgeny Kutik at the Kennedy Center

Many artists cite their family as one of their main sources of inspiration, but violinist Yevgeny Kutik can make a stronger claim than most. Even some of the repertoire he performs stems directly from...

Review: ‘The Mighty Five and Friends’ by the Russian Chamber Art Society at the French Embassy

With the concept of nationalism hovering uneasily in the political air, it was as edifying as it was gratifying to hear four first-rate musicians celebrate in song some of the masterworks of what...

Behind the Scenes at Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Props Warehouse

Staging an epic that involves a bloody chain of events in “a deluge of violence,” as the Shakespeare Theatre Company describes The Oresteia, requires not just the skills and talents of the actors on...

Magic Time: ‘Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

The splashy opening is spectacularly preconception-smashing. We know we’re about to see a play premised on a 1953 meeting in a Paris café between the literary lion Richard Wright and James Baldwin,...

Review: ‘Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

In Les Deux Noirs: Notes on Notes of a Native Son, Playwright Psalmayene 24, Director Raymond O. Caldwell, and Founding Artistic Director Ari Roth take on the risky task of staging a well-known and...

Who Gets To Feel Safe? A Conversation Inspired by Mosaic’s ‘Native Son’

Theater and Policy Salon partners with New York University Washington Center to organize a conversation on “Who Gets to Feel Safe?” in conjunction with Mosaic Theater Company’s productions of Native...

Review: ‘Beckett Trio, Part 2’ by Scena Theatre

Ready for your Samuel Beckett fix? A fix for the lesser-known, very short-form works by the winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature? If you are the least bit curious and open to a quieter form...

Review: ‘A Comedy of Tenors’ at Olney Theatre Center

Things are getting silly at the Olney Theatre Center these days. Very, very, silly. Very skillfully silly, in the production of Ken Ludwig’s A Comedy of Tenors. A follow-on to Ludwig’s highly popular...

Magic Time!: Inside the DC Jail with Liza Jessie Peterson and ‘The Peculiar Patriot’

Actor and Playwright Liza Jessie Peterson is an extraordinary artist/activist. Tucked inside her uproarious one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot—which she performs through April 20, 2019, at Woolly...

Review: ‘A New Brain’ at the Colonial Players of Annapolis

Harmonious voices! Hilarious hoofing! A dancing frog! With over 30 songs packed into its 90 minutes, the Colonial Players’ A New Brain is a magnificent autobiographical musical comedy that is based on...

Interview: JaBen Early in Arena Stage’s ‘Junk’

JaBen Early is a Washingtonian through and through. His father worked at the Smithsonian, and his mother was a teacher in DC. He went to Morehouse College and Sarah Lawrence University, and studied...

Review: ‘Junk’ at Arena Stage

“When did money become the thing—the only thing?” asks an ambitious young financial journalist in her opening monologue. She then answers her own question: “The mid-eighties. 1985 to be exact…. It was...

Review: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Porgy and Bess’ a Crowd-Pleaser

Let’s get the persnickety stuff out of the way first. Then we can get to why the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s second Porgy and Bess in concert at the Strathmore Music Center in three years is...

Michael Kahn & Friends Off the Record: The Folger Years: A Celebration in Pictures

“I think you have to define who you are–and that definition can change–but you have to be as uncompromising as you possibly can about who you think you are, and to fight for that, in bad times and...

Signature Theatre Announces 2019-2020 Season

Signature Theatre Announces 30th Anniversary Season, including new and inventive stagings of: ASSASSINS A CHORUS LINE HAIR NIJINSKY’S LAST DANCE The DC Premiere of: CARYL CHURCHILL’S PLAY ESCAPED...

Review: ‘Grand Hotel’ at Signature Theatre

Time may be running out for the denizens of Berlin’s swanky Weimar era Grand Hotel who wonder if life has passed them by. But Signature Theatre’s roaring, non-stop rendering of the musical Grand Hotel...

Review: ‘Appropriate’ at Silver Spring Stage

Silver Spring Stage is known for producing professional-level community theater, garnering more WATCH nominations and awards than any other company in Maryland. The Obie-award winner Appropriate by...

Review: ‘Play Date’ at Best Medicine Rep

Farce is a classic form of comedy, based on ludicrous characters, silly situations, mistaken identities, sex, slapstick, and many slamming doors. After centuries of development (refinement would be...

Review: Kristin Chenoweth at Strathmore

If you happened to see something akin to celestial beings descending on North Bethesda on Monday evening, don’t worry – that wasn’t actually Heaven coming down, it was just the sound of Kristin...

‘Two Wings’ Celebrates the Music of Black America in Migration

“Pick a chord and I’ll be there,” Alicia Hall Moran told husband Jason Moran from the stage of a packed performance hall at Georgetown University. Moran, accompanying on piano, nodded in agreement....

Review: ‘Pinter Rep’ by Scena Theatre

When Pinter is performed with precision, with exacting attention to the text—as is the case with Scena Theatre’s razor-sharp Pinter Rep—the effect can be both unnerving and exhilarating. The tension...

Studio Theatre Announces 2019-2020 Season

Studio Theatre’s 2019-2020 Main Series Season: Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley White Pearl by Anchuli Felicia King Pipeline by Dominique Morrisseau Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu Fun Home by...

Hit the Bars (of Music) For Lunch: Free Midday Concerts in the DC Area

Food trucks are a fun and a convenient way to sample something tasty and new, but don’t forget to check out the bars – of music that is. Several DC area venues offer bite-sized classical music...

Review: ‘P.Y.G. or The Mis-Edumacation of Dorian Belle’ at Studio Theatre

Don’t be put off by the deliberately opaque, long title of the current world premiere at Studio Theatre’s experimental space. P.Y.G. or The Mis-Edumacation of Dorian Belle is a very slick,...

Review: ‘The Peculiar Patriot’ at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company

A klaxon sounds. A video montage of “Betsy” LaQuanda Ross (actor and playwright Liza Jessie Peterson) passing through the visitor entrance at a correctional facility plays in black and white on the...

Amanda Gookin’s Forward Music Project at Kennedy Center’s Direct Current Festival

Amanda Gookin is a cellist, a founding member of the acclaimed music group PUBLIQuartet, and, since 2015, the founder of the Forward Music Project, which commissions new multimedia works for solo...

Review: ‘Ghost-Writer’ by Quotidian Theatre Company

There is a mystery at the heart of Ghost-Writer, currently being presented by the Quotidian Theatre Company at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. Not that Michael Hollinger’s drama is a lighthearted...

Review: ‘Clothes for a Summer Hotel’ by Rainbow Theatre Project

Rainbow Theatre Project has presented a trenchant and exciting production of the rarely produced Clothes for a Summer Hotel. The dualistic themes of the great playwright Tennessee Williams are found...

Review: Curse of the Starving Class at Maryland Ensemble Theatre

When we first see the Tate family in Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class, now playing at Frederick’s Maryland Ensemble Theatre (MET), they are already doomed, they just don’t fully know it yet....

Review: ‘As You Like It’ by Brave Spirits Theatre

Ah, Shakespeare’s As You Like It–the ultimate romantic comedy about people trying to find their way to love in a bewildering world; a world that seems to have no rules, or rules that are made as one...

Folger Shakespeare Library Celebrates Shakespeare’s Birthday with Annual Open House Celebration

The Folger Shakespeare Library will host its annual open house and Shakespeare birthday celebration on Sunday, April 14 beginning at 12 pm. This free, family-friendly event throws open the doors of...

Review: ‘New York City Ballet: New Works and New Productions’ at the Kennedy Center

It’s been a challenging few years for New York City Ballet, the nation’s preeminent ballet company. What with the misconduct and resignation of its ballet master in chief, subsequent misconduct...

Review: The Kennedy Center’s ‘Celebrating the Human Spirit Awards’ Gala featuring Idina Menzel

The Kennedy Center’s annual party with a purpose on Wednesday night, the Celebrating the Human Spirit Awards Gala, honored Distinguished Philanthropists Patrick G. Ryan and Shirley W. Ryan and Citizen...

George Mason University Center for the Arts Announces its 2019-2020 Season

The Center for the Arts at George Mason University has announced the 2019/2020 season of Great Performances at Mason, its annual series featuring leading national and international artists in the...

Review: ‘Siwayul (Heart of a Womxn)’ by Nelwat Ishkamewe Two-Spirit Theatre

American theater blows off a lot of folx. Leaves out their voices. Doesn’t cast them. Isn’t interested in their stories. Two-Spirit indigenous transpeople, for conspicuous instance, are among the...

Review: ‘Analogy Trilogy’ by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company at the Kennedy Center

It’s too simplistic to call Bill T. Jones a choreographer, although that’s been his stock and trade for more than 40 years. This past week his Analogy unfolded as a trilogy, over three nights at the...

Review: ‘New York City Ballet: Works by Balanchine, Robbins, and Reisen’ at the Kennedy Center

Spring is in the air with not only the blooming cherry blossoms but also the bursting energy of the New York City Ballet’s exciting spring concert at the Kennedy Center. Something old and something...

Magic Time!: ‘Native Son’ at Mosaic Theater Company

When one has an overwhelming experience in the theater—as I did watching Native Son at Mosaic—it can take some time to process. This is especially so if the work is unlike anything one thought...

Review: ‘Amazing Grace’ at the Museum of the Bible

In 2017, the Broadway musical Amazing Grace opened its national tour with a stint at the World Stage Theater at Washington, D.C.’s Museum of the Bible. (DC Metro Theatre Arts’ review of that...