Roger Catlin - Page 6

The Faction of Fools Theatre Company specializes in the arcane form of the Italian Renaissance, commedia dell’arte, with elaborate masks, exaggerated movements and a kind of extreme reading of what often are classic texts. The troupe’s “Commedia Romeo and Juliet,” revived earlier this year, was a good example of that. 

It’s hard to imagine the impact George C. Wolfe’s razor-sharp satire “The Colored Museum” must have had when it opened in New York nearly 40 years ago. 

The intent of Wolf Trap’s annual “Broadway in the Park” event is to blend the star power of the Great White Way (if it’s still called that) with the rising stars of the local co-presenter, Signature Theatre.

It was a one-two punch to fans of David Bowie in early 2016 when the rock star was suddenly pronounced dead and two days later, on what would have been his 69th birthday, released his final album, “Blackstar,” a preordained farewell addressing his demise.

After the former First Lady of Argentina died in 1952 at 33, after a life that inspired plays, books, movies, musicals and dance productions, she was such a charged figure everybody knew that simple burial would not do.

What did our critic think of DIXIE'S TUPPERWARE PARTY at Kennedy Center?

What did our critic think of HOMELESS GARDEN at Avant Bard?

The producer Larry Klein honored the memory of Leonard Cohen with a 2022 tribute album that had a hushed sensibility and taste, as well as an impressive array of vocalists. Hoping to continue that feel, he began work on an equally fine performance version with the same title, “This is Now: A Tribute to Leonard Cohen,” which played two nights with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center over the weekend. 

It’s the painting Girl with a Flute, long attributed to Vermeer, that adorns the program cover of the Washington Stage Guild’s world premiere production of “An Unbuilt Life.” 

You meet in the hotel lobby and go up the elevator in two groups of 10 to the fourth floor. Once assembled there, you’re led to a community room where you take your seat around a table covered in clumps of black earth that we’ll soon come to learn is peat. Irish peat, from the bogs. Three hundred pounds of it, shipped from the Emerald Isle.

Somewhere between touring tribute acts and high-gloss Broadway jukebox musical bios are the more modest regional  musicals created to nominally perform the hits of a legacy pop act, in costume, adding biographical details as a story arc.

The American musical giant Duke Ellington wrote more than 1,000 compositions in his long career, and to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth in his native city, The Kennedy Center is determined to celebrate a lot of them. 

There’s an awful lot of death in opera, Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, lamented on a recent opening night. And those plentiful tragedies are also often further burdened with overbearing scores, turgid storylines, super-large casts and strident if not shrill performances. 

The historical Coriolanus, if he existed at all, was Rome’s most fearsome fighter, trained as a child, excelling as a warrior-leader and able to conquer whole other cities sometimes single-handedly. Even so, James Finley, who portrays the title character in Shakespeare’s tragedy in an eye-opening co-production by the Avant Bard Theatre with Longacre Lea, may be working even harder.

“Pequeñas Infidelidades (Little Infidelidades),” the latest production at the tiny Teatro de La Luna on Georgia Avenue, is a nifty two-hander in which a couple seems to accidentally meet after years apart. Through their banter and barbs we eventually learn the truth behind their past union, their individual paths since and their current intent.

The dance school choices for students, I recall, were ballet and jazz tap. Ne’er the twain shall meet, as Kipling said of the east and west. 

The biggest drama at the GALA Hispanic Theatre this year didn’t happen on stage; it was the $250,000 that was stolen when its bank account was hacked and drained, threatening the long-serving Spanish-language performance space as its 50th anniversary approached.

Commedia dell’Arte was a theatrical style that developed in Italy more than 450 years ago. Intended for the lower classes, with exuberant physical movement, improvisation, lots of masks and stock characters like the Harlequin and Pulcinella, it was a celebratory perfect for the carnivale circuit.

What did our critic think of AMERICAN OPERA INITIATIVE: THREE 20-MINUTE OPERAS at Kennedy Center?

British playwright Mike Bartlett, born in 1980, takes up the legacy of London’s swinging 60s in his play Love Love Love currently running in a sharp, well-acted production at Studio Theatre.