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Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical (review)
Amid a year of callousness, a message of kindness is joyfully delivered in Toby’s Dinner Theatre’s production of Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical, touchingly directed by Shawn Kettering. For a...
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U. S. premiere of The State at Forum Theatre (review)
The State begins with utmost silence. As soon as the lights dim, we obediently silence ourselves, waiting for the pivotal moment to mark the beginning of the show. Yet, we’re greeted with silence, and...
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Annie inspires Olney’s pajama drive for children in foster care.
Annie finds a new family in the holiday musical, now onstage at Olney Theatre Center. Olney’s meeting with Bob Scheer of Comfort Cases inspired the company to open a drive to bring new pajamas to...
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Guide to Holiday shows 2017 in the DC/Baltimore areas
There are plenty of shows filled with holiday spirit (and spirits) from the sweet to the scary on our stages this year. Here’s a look. CHRISTMAS CAROLS For those longing for one more retelling of...
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Peekaboo! A Nativity Play (review)
The Hub Theatre adds a new production to the canon of Christmas stories with its world premiere of Anne M. McGraw’s Peekaboo! A Nativity Play. Described as a “heartfelt farce” with music, the...
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Washington’s own Nutcracker from Washington Ballet (review)
There is finally something happening on Pennsylvania Avenue to bring Washington some bipartisan joy. No, not there. A couple blocks away, at the Warner Theatre, where Clara and her prince vanquish an...
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Studio Theatre’s Curve of Departure (review)
The convening of people who may not have anything more in common with one another than shared DNA at holiday time can result in more misery than merriment for all involved. A funeral, too, can provide...
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Steve Beall’s astounding performance in St. Nicholas (review)
Rich, roiling, profound and profane, Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas is A Christmas Carol turned inside out. Whereas Ebenezer Scrooge had his blighted stinginess scoured through a vision of his past,...
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Whodunnit? Only 1 actor knows in WIT’s murder mystery (review)
“Seasonal Disorder” is an improv grab bag of sorts. Depending on which night a person shows up, between now and December 31st, the audience can end up seeing everything from comedy to drama, from a...
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Cameron Folmar on playing David Sedaris’ elf
In a comical nod to Christmas, the Drafthouse Comedy Theater is staging best-selling humorist David Sedaris’ one-man show, The SantaLand Diaries, from Dec. 7-23, starring Cameron Folmar (STC’s School...
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Kid-empowering Madeline’s Christmas enchants at Creative Cauldron (review)
From the moment you step into the lobby of Creative Cauldron, Madeline’s Christmas will teach your kids to be the protagonists of their own stories. Much like a Wonder Woman or Captain America costume...
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Great Shakes: Lauren Gunderson’s The Book of Will at Round House (review)
Imagine a world without Macbeth, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Taming of the Shrew or Julius Caesar. Before the publishing of Shakespeare’s anthologized plays in Folio format in 1623, these plays and...
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Comic Michael Harris plays Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof
Michael Harris remembers fondly the first time he watched the 1971 film of Fiddler on the Roof and seeing that “big happy guy going nuts.” That, of course, was Topol as Tevye, the poor milkman whose...
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Why we could say ‘Yes’ to St. Nicholas
Happy St. Nicholas Day! Last weekend, I watched a marvelous production of St. Nicholas in Bethesda’s Quotidian Theatre. Quotidian is a fine small theater with special expertise in plays by Horton Foote...
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Review: Uma Thurman debuts in Beau Willimon’s The Parisian Woman set in DC
Uma Thurman and Josh Lucas neither kill a dog nor bed an FBI agent in The Parisian Woman, a tame, tidy, talky and only superficially timely play about a D.C. power couple engaged in political intrigue....
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The Last Night of Ballyhoo at Theater J (review)
“Jewish Christmas trees don’t have stars!” Or at least they don’t according to Boo Levy, one of the matriarchs of the affluent southern Jewish Freitag-Levy household where the family has barely heard...
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Private Confessions, Liv Ullman’s scintillating tribute to Ingmar Bergman....
As part of the Bergman 100 Celebration, an event marking the centenary of the iconic Swedish filmmaker and stage director Ingmar Bergman, The Kennedy Center is presenting a stage version of one of his...
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An Operetta Holiday from In Series – like a box of chocolates (review)
As I flipped through the program of An Operetta Holiday, I was struck by director Nick Olcott’s quote at the top of his note: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.” In a way, these words ring true....
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Signature brightens the season with Holiday Follies (review)
Young new performers who you may not have heard about are finally getting their time in the ARK spotlight at Signature Theatre. Katie Mariko Mariko Murray, Ines Nassara and David Rowen have paid their...
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Review: Meteor Shower gives off only a few sparks
Reverting to his early-career wackiness, Steve Martin enlists four phenomenal performers, including Amy Schumer making her Broadway debut, for a joke-filled, overlong, trickster comedy sketch about...
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