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Review: Illyria, or What You Will, a wildly imaginative Twelfth Night
The challenge of finding a fresh take on any play by The Bard has foiled many an artist, but Avant Bard joyfully clears that hurdle with Illyria, or What You Will, a clever reimagining of Twelfth...
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Review: The Waverly Gallery. Elaine May thrills in her return to Broadway
Elaine May is back on a Broadway stage after more than 50 years, and making the most of it in The Waverly Gallery, Kenneth Lonergan’s meticulously observed, funny and sad play about a woman’s decline...
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Ready to Fringe again? Charm City Fringe in Baltimore starts November 1
The 2018 Charm City Fringe Festival returns to the Bromo Arts District with 23 productions and more than 80 performances taking place between November 1 and November 11. Baltimore talent for this...
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Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a passion project for NextStop’s Evan Hoffman
While John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath have historically been on high school reading lists for decades, one of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner’s more ambitious works, East...
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Review: Little Shop of Horrors. Megan Hilty and cast give smashing performances
I’ll bet my mutant Venus fly trap you know this show. Little Shop of Horrors took off-Broadway by storm in the 1980s, the talented team of book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan...
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Review: Paglen’s Sight Machine. Trevor Paglen’s art by algorithm with the...
Hank Dutt has played the viola in the Kronos Quartet, the world’s most famous avant-garde string quartet, for over forty years. His face is still gorgeous; his cheekbones sit as high as mountain...
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Review: The Fever at Woolly Mammoth won’t be the same without you
Sitting in a circle of chairs facing inwards, arranged at the outermost edges of an otherwise empty stage, it is impossible to discern the actors from the audience. There is a playful tension in the...
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Review: A Midnight Dreary, horror with a dash of humor, shaken and stirred
Darkness, corpses, catacombs, and cats: welcome to the world of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories embody the spirit of Halloween, which is why it’s fitting that We Happy Few is performing his poetry and...
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Review: Long Way Down. Justin Weaks’ solo performance a revelation
You’re a fifteen-year-old boy named Will, and your eighteen-year-old brother has been shot. Shawn was your friend, your protector, and your teacher ever since your father was killed, and now he’s dead....
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Playwright Ntozake Shange has died at age 70
The novelist, poet, performer and playwright Ntozake Shange, best known for her 1976 Obie-winning choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, died last Saturday...
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Review: Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! High food prices skyrocket Dario Fo’s farce
Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay! could just as easily be titled “I Love Antonia” for the heroine’s strong similarities to Lucille Ball and the crazily comic situations navigated by two working class couples....
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Review: East of Eden at NextStop Theatre
East of Eden is an American classic, a huge and sprawling novel, stretching from the Civil War to World War I and from California to Connecticut. John Steinbeck — who won the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes...
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Review: King John. Aaron Posner rescues this lesser Shakespeare
Director Aaron Posner has assembled some of the most splendid, certainly several of them among the most beloved actors who tread the local boards. Indeed, Folger Theatre has done further valuable...
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Review: Sweat, Lynn Nottage’s brutal, brilliant sucker punch at Everyman Theatre
The white-hot rage and caustic bitterness against de-industrialization, unemployment, minorities, and immigrants, not to mention races and religions other than white and Christian, may have escalated...
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Review: Sheila and Moby, a perfect fit for Flying V
Local playwright Patrick Flynn has spent the last two years developing his new comedy about growing up and proving how“adults can be idiots, just like children.” Sheila and Moby receives its world...
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Review: Venus in Fur. Ives’ cheeky play of obsession, bondage and revenge at...
The masochist believes in the transformative power of magic, of the variety that the goddess Circe used to turn Odysseus’ men into swine. To the masochist, the beloved is a goddess (Venus, perhaps),...
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Librettist Mark Campbell on Silent Night, the WWI Christmas Eve miracle on...
Librettist Mark Campbell and I last spoke when he was mentoring young librettists in a “supportive role” for Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative. Now Campbell is front and center for...
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Review: The Agitators. Friends and fighters, Frederick Douglass and Susan B...
The first time they met in western New York, in the fall of 1849, playwright Mat Smart imagines, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony would have had a wary interchange. Both are strong willed...
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In his first play, Parts of a Night, retired actor Rick Foucheux writes about...
When Rick Foucheux retired from acting, he did so as one of the most popular, award-winning, one might even say beloved performers in town. Many bemoaned the prospect of no more Foucheux on local...
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The Washington Ballet’s modern dance program shines a fresh light on...
The Washington Ballet’s Contemporary Masters program, which opened Wednesday night at the Harman Center for the Arts and continues through Sunday, is a master class in late 20th Century modern dance...
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