Roger Catlin - Page 17

Some of Aretha Franklin's greatest performances happened at the Kennedy Center - chief of which may have been a 2015 performance of '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' at the Kennedy Center Honors that made Barack Obama shed a tear in the Presidential box.

The 2003 romantic comedy 'Love Actually' airs every year, so why not the parody of it as well?

Because Christmas is mandatory on entertainment stages all month, it's no surprise that a cabaret at Signature Theatre is again devoted to the Yuletide songbook. But in a clever and very welcome variation, they've approached the holiday through the classic interpretations of one of America's favorite labels.

If Charles Dickens were working today, he'd likely be enlisted to write for one of the serialized television dramas on which millions feed on and binge. In his day, the equivalent was writing serialized dramas for publication to boost readership.

Before he became the last president of Czechoslovakia - and the first president of the Czech Republic -- the famous Eastern European freedom fighter Václav Havel was a playwright. His works before the revolution spoke to issues arising from Soviet rule, as did the plays that followed it.

Kudos to We Happy Few artistic director Kerry McGee for researching 'obsessively' the works of female playwrights of the 17th and 18th century, and for finding one in particular that can speak to modern audiences with some verve and relevance.

There are signs that the grandaddy of role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons, is making a comeback, even among the kind of kids who'd usually be glued to their computer games. But its depiction - and general celebration - in Qui Nguyen's 'She Kills Monsters' currently being revived by Rorschach Theatre at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, only seems to show it fading into the past faster than it did the last time it unfolded on this very stage in 2014.

Just as African-American artists have sought to reclaim the racist imagery of the past to confront contemporary viewers, the entryway to the Theater Alliance's performance of 'Day of Absence' at the Anacostia Playhouse is decorated with oversized posters advertising blackface minstrel shows.

Playwright Jocelyn Bioh long wanted to name her 2017 work about the social interworkings of young women in Ghana simply 'School Girls.' But it wasn't until she added the subtitle, 'African Mean Girls Play,' that she fully nailed what she was doing.

'Life is a Dream' sounds as if it would be a carefree, happy-go-lucky kind of story.

Pull up a bar stool. The Irish barkeep has a little story to tell you. The saga of 'The Smuggler,' a new prize-winning play by Ronán Noone, couldn't have a more authentic setting than the gently curved eight-seat wooden bar in the speakeasy-like Allegory Bar at the Eaton Hotel downtown. That's where the Irish arts collective Solas Nua has ingeniously set the one man play.

At the outset of Mosaic Theatre's fifth season opener, 'Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine,' the biggest problem facing its central character is the lack of a celebrity for a big Manhattan benefit she's throwing. A high powered PR agent, she throws out a bunch of names cavalierly, and belittles her assistant, who is responsible for getting it all done.

It was rare that a Democrat became governor of red-state Texas in the 1990s; rarer still that she was a woman.

Gerry is the kind of guy who arrives at a party like an explosion, talks a mile a minute, has an opinion about everything, exudes outrageous hilarity and hardly lets anyone else get a word in. With him around, why even cast other characters at the party?

Running a small opera company requires innovation enough, but Washington's Urban Arias goes further, by commissioning new works, or finding pieces that are little known or rarely performed and infusing them with reliable company talent that can electrify their purposely small audiences.

There's a transcendent moment in 'Twisted Melodies,' the one-man Donny Hathaway show by Kelvin Roston Jr. at Mosaic Theater Company, in which the audience and performer are one, singing and clapping to 'The Ghetto,' under his direction, and getting a groove on.

Elderly assisted living can be a shared room prison, so the set for David Lindsay-Abaire play 'Ripcord' at the Keegan Theatre has the tidy room explode a coupe of times into some unexpected scenes, from a haunted house to the blue skies that give the comic play its title.