Scena Theatre productions are never mere theatrical comfort food; they generally have classical or European roots and, whether comic or tragic, they are always intellectually serious affairs, out to show us or make us think about interesting matters.
A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, translated, adapted, and directed by Joanie Schultz, runs through September 28, at Everyman Theatre.
Given the moat of terrible traffic that separates Baltimore theatergoers from Arlington, what can justify a visit there? Well, one answer for sure is Signature Theatre’s stunning production of the 2014 musical The Bridges of Madison County.
I think the minimalism and starkness is intended to be clarifying; we are meant to be focused on the hearts of the various intertwined stories Shakespeare presents, and perhaps less distracted by other things going on at the very large periphery the playwright has laid out.
So, by virtue of all of these elements this show is compleat in the senses fostered by the archaic spelling of the word, what Webster's renders as 'having all the necessary or desired elements or skills.
The Sound Inside, by Adam Rapp, now gracing the boards at Baltimore's Everyman Theatre, is one of those all-too-rare plays that just bowls you over, even if, afterwards, you’re not quite sure where you’ve been during its bemusing 90 minutes.
The play doesn’t do either superficiality or depth well.
Families, sisterly conflicts, alienation from parents, suicidal tendencies, dissociation, nostalgia for childhood mingled with mature reevaluation of it: all these themes and tropes are universal.
Go See It! Join the enthralled cult! It’s for anyone who was ever a theater or choir kid.
We do get a sort of happy ending, but not with a gratifying round of absolution for everyone.
As the director says, this is a 'Black play that speaks to Black people and talks about Black shit.
You not only have to have the talent to do the technical side of costume drama well, and have actors who can emote convincingly and then (in this case) reverse gears convincingly, and then reverse gears again as many times as the script calls for.
They sure don't write them like Holiday anymore.
There’s so much to like in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s current revival of Twelfth Night, a production that succeeds in big things and small, that I can’t imagine any spectator walking away unsatisfied.
Dated and flawed as I consider it, Sweet Charity is something of a landmark in the world of the American musical, and this rendition is admirable.
A well-made, stunning play, about racist mental hospital practices in the not very long-distant past, with four strongly-imagined characters and an explosive ending.
In the end, it is largely the combination of sensitively-selected detail and poetic diction on the one hand, and the big-picture view of various interlocked social problems that makes the show so extraordinary.
Babel, which invites us to contemplate a world, apparently in the near future, in which the human genome is so well understood that every person’s – and fetus’s – potential, including the potential for antisocial behavior – is determinable, and if a child cannot be “certified” while in
The play is an ungodly and irremediable mess, but it does demonstrate the importance of the proposition for which the central character was willing to put his career at risk, i.
