Keith Tittermary - Page 2

Back in the late 1970's Wildwood Summer Theater was producing a disco-themed West Side Story in the old Rockville Mall. In that production was a young high school kid named Michael Mayer who was dancing as a Jet. In 2007, that young kid won a Tony Award for directing the new Broadway Musical, Spring Awakening. Since 1965, WST has been producing shows that feature those between the ages of 14 and 25 in every single aspect. From director to orchestra to designer, every person involved is under 25.

Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman made their mark with the early Disney musicals, and always included a sense of "home" and "belonging". As much as Disney's The Little Mermaid is a princess-story aimed at the pre-teen audience, it also has a deeper message of being a fish out of water, only in Ariel's case she is a fish in water who doesn't belong.

Disney's The Little Mermaid is coming to Wolf Trap from June 29 - July 2. The smash musical, based on the 1989 Disney film, will only be here for 5 performances. I had the opportunity to talk to Broadway Veteran, Eric Kunze, who plays Prince Eric.

Sometimes you attend a performance and one of the most memorable parts is something unscripted and spontaneous, and that leaves you with a lasting impression of the performance. In Mouth Open, Story Jump Out, the phenomenal solo performance by UK spoken word artist, Polarbear, something unscripted happened and it was truly wonderful.

The Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences takes a bold leap in bringing this one man show from Red Bridge Arts in Scotland. Titus, a show recommended for audiences 12 and up tackles serious issues that unfortunately in today's society, children may face.

The Maryland Opera Studio at the University of Maryland's School of Music is a two-year program for graduate students in Opera Performance. Their ambitious The Orpheus Adventure is a gorgeous endeavor between the School of Music, along with the Theater and Dance Departments.

“Men are like weapons. Women are like wounds.” That is a poignant line and an apt summation of the first part of Forum Theatre's #NastyWomen ethos. The first piece in this horrifying, yet deeply moving, work is Monica Byrne's What Every Girl Should Know, which takes place in 1914 and follows four teen girls in a New York reformatory.

Highwood Theater in Silver Spring has been providing education in a 'community-produced' environment for more than 10 years, but recently has moved into producing professional theater in their new black box theater. I applaud the work that founder and Executive Director Kevin Kearney has been doing and the organization he has created.

The American Pops Orchestra, founded in 2015 by Maestro Luke Frazier has a mission to 'breath new life into orchestral pops programming and inspiring new audiences to discover the wealth of material in the Great American Songbook in dynamic ways.'

The In Series, which creates innovative theatrical programming around a classical music core of opera, cabaret, and song, presents a tune-filled look at the music of Irving Berlin, one of America's most celebrated composers. Artistic Director Carla Hubner notes in the program: "George Gershwin called Berlin 'the greatest songwriter that has ever lived.'" I tend to agree, although I would reserve that for Mr. Gershwin, but at the In Series, they crafted a delightful evening filled with some of his most memorable songs.

Adapting Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is somewhat of a requirement for established theatre companies. There are many versions of the tale from musicals, CGI movies, radio plays, and irreverent comedies. Playwright (and Keegan Theatre Company Member) Matthew Keenan adds his version to the litany of adaptations and does so with a delightful spin in An Irish Carol.

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard". The old adage has been attributed to countless comedians over the years. When a musical comedy attempts to combine comedy and death, the outcome can either be successful (think Monty Python) or fall on its face. Ruthless! The Musical, a 1992 off Broadway campy musical, which opened this week at Creative Cauldron in Falls Church, falls into the latter category. The intermission-less show written by Marvin Laird and Joel Paley has funny bits, and a few memorable songs, but overall the piece, which has had a successful life in regional theater, is just flat. Sure, it spoofs musicals like Gypsy and movies like All About Eve, but the humor is a bit rudimentary and plays more like a bad SNL skit, then a well-polished farce.

Every child has that one stuffed animal that they can't live without. Every parent knows the dilemma of what happens when the toy goes missing and the tantrum that follows. In the opening of Adventure Theatre - MTC's 65th season, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical perfectly describes every parent's worst nightmare: the missing beloved toy.

'Wow! This is amazing!'

The Broadway composer Cy Coleman is completely underrated. His range of musicals stretch from traditional musical (Little Me) to 60's pop (Sweet Charity) to comic operetta (On The Twentieth Century). His greatest triumph is the hard jazz / film noire musical City of Angels. On Saturday night, the DC area professional premier opened at NextStop Theatre in Herndon, Virginia.

In 2006, then Washington National Opera Artistic Director Placido Domingo announced that the Opera would take on their first complete cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). In the subsequent years, the opera produced the first three of the four-some, but not in quick succession. As the opera and the nation suffered an economic downturn, the complete cycle was never realized. Until now.

Brick, the fermenting favorite son in Tennessee Williams' masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof says that there are two ways out of life: death and liquor. Brick is trying to escape his life with the latter, while Big Daddy is facing the first. Father and son are so far away from each other that when the climax of the show occurs during the second act, you see the intersection between one who wants to live and one who wants to forget.

David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof is about as well constructed a play as ever written. The simple story revolves around Catherine, a young woman on the eve of her 25th birthday who is dealing with the death of Robert, her mathematician father; the arrival of her precocious sister, Claire; and Hal, a young former PhD student of her father's coming to go through his writings.

When playwright Motti Lerner wrote his controversial play The Admission, no one could have predicted the chain of events that would subsequently occur. From the production's workshop run at Theater J to Studio Theater, to the formation of Mosaic Theater Company, a lot has happened which now culminates in Lerner's latest play After The War, the penultimate production of Mosaic's Voices from a Changing Middle East Festival in their inaugural season.  

A gem of a musical written by The Fantasticks team of Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones with libretto by N. Richard Nash (using his own play The Rainmaker as basis) is about a con man coming into town to 'sell' rain to a drought-stricken, Depression-era Texas town, but winds up creating a miracle along the way. Schmidt and Jones' score is far superior to their tour-de-force The Fantasticks, while Nash's libretto is bit on the sugary side yet it is still a beautiful tale of miracles happening in the most unlikely of places.