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Review: Anna Ziegler’s Boy at Keegan Theatre
As I was watching the DC premiere of Anna Ziegler’s inspired-by-a-true-story play, Boy, now playing at Keegan Theatre, there was an Oscar Wilde quote rattling around in the back of my brain (because...
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Review: Mother Road, a rip-roaring road drama, buddy comedy, musical, and...
“How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?” So wonders the desperate Joad family in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” as they burn their belongings before fleeing...
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Review: Richard & Jane & Dick & Sally at Baltimore Center Stage
Boy, things have certainly changed since the days of “See Spot Run.” Dick is sick and goes by the grown-up name Richard (Neimah Djourabchi, a textbook 50s Dad with existential longing). His wife...
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Review: Crowns at Creative Cauldron
Ladies—dig out your hat boxes, Crowns is back in town! The production at Creative Cauldron is captivating and beautifully relays the meaning, messages, stories and significance of church ladies and...
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Review: Anne Washburn’s Shipwreck at Woolly Mammoth
Shipwreck: A History Play About 2017 is a gas giant of a play, Jovian in proportion, profoundly ambitious, wonderfully weird, beautifully written, Dostoyevskian in scope. It is three hours ten minutes...
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Review: Thumbelina at Imagination Stage. Puppetry and design bring the tiny...
To children, the world is often a large and overbearing place. Think of how difficult it would be if each chair you sat in was three feet tall, the table even higher, and the doorknob impossibly out of...
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Arena Stage announces its history-focused 2020-2021 season
American History — some real, some imagined — will mark Arena’s ten-production 2020-2021 season. The inaugural show at the Mead Center for American Theater will be a world-premiere musical about one of...
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Gun & Powder. Taking back the house. Flo, Sissy, the sisters Clarke and me.
Waiting for Gun & Powder to begin, I was surrounded. To my left, a middle-aged couple, both white, very quiet. To my right, a younger couple, both male. Behind me, three African American friends,...
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Review: Brave Spirits’ Henry the Fourth, Part 2. Strong cast. Superb Falstaff.
Brave Spirits’ two-year repertory of Shakespeare’s history cycle continues with an impressively lively production of one of the Bard’s more challenging plays, Henry the Fourth, Part 2. After Part 1...
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Review: The Snowy Day at Adventure Theatre MTC and a dad’s-eye view of TYA shows
The Shark, my desultory 3 year old, was hopping from place to place in Glen Echo Park in anticipation of seeing The Snowy Day and Other Stories, a musical adaptation of one of the most popular books of...
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Review: The Amen Corner at Shakespeare Theatre
You may feel like you’ve landed in a retro church service for the first 15 minutes of the sparkling new production of The Amen Corner from Shakespeare Theatre Company, what with the “praise Gods,”...
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Taffety Punk’s restages suicide.chat.room. For Marcus Kyd, it’s very personal.
Marcus Kyd has two résumés (acting and directing) and a music catalogue. This may not sound special until you realize that both résumés, filled to the margins with production credits, do not contain...
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Review: Weep. a world premiere from Nu Sass Productions
It’s an image as ancient and archetypal as Medea and La Llorona, and as modern as Andrea Yates—a woman, a mother, standing over the bodies of her drowned children. From this shocking visual, which goes...
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What James Baldwin is telling us in The Amen Corner
At its Sidney Harman Hall, The Shakespeare Theatre has mounted what may be the quintessential production of James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner. James Baldwin (Photo courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre...
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Review: Kill Move Paradise asks Why are we so afraid of young black men?
When a show lists a Trauma Counselor in the credits and has a “healing space” outside of the theater proper, you know you are in for an intense experience. Kill Move Paradise will make you feel like...
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How Monumental Theatre honors Head Over Heel’s celebration of acceptance with...
Head Over Heels made a splash on Broadway in 2016, notably starring the first transgender actor playing an out nonbinary character in a Broadway musical — Peppermint as Phythio. Now, the DMV is about...
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Review: Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die opens Off-Broadway
We’re all in pain – because of loneliness or loss, betrayal or illness – and playwright Young Jean Lee wants to offer us some comfort. This might not be immediately apparent, given the title of her...
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Review: Ordinary Days, Adam Gwon’s charming chamber musical
Adam Gwon’s chamber musical Ordinary Days is ostensibly the story of four young adults searching for love and their “life stories” in New York City. Yet the real love story at the heart of the show is...
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Taffety Punks’ suicide.chat.room. For choreographer Paulina Guerrero,...
Paulina Guerrero is the choreographer for the tenth year anniversary of suicide.chat.room, opening this week at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. Guerrero joins us to talk about the differences of building...
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Review: Anna Ziegler’s The Wanderers, a perfect marriage of script and...
There’s a saying among actors: “There’s no such thing as a perfect show.” Anyone lucky enough to see Theater J’s production of The Wanderers will have to politely disagree: top to bottom, this is as...
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