WASHINGTON, DC THEATER REVIEWS

It won't be the novelty of these plays that will continue to draw us to Wilson's compelling portraits of the Hill District in Pittsburgh; it will be his indelibly drawn characters given new life by artists putting their own personal stamp on his work. August Wilson is meant to be savored live; he c...

When I told my friends that I was going to see Gavin Creel's show, guys and girls alike had the same response: a?oeHe is my ultimate Broadway boyfriend.a?? If you have the same affinity for the Tony Award winner, his solo concert is the night you've been dreaming of....

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There are just a few seats left for The Improvised Shakespeare Company's last few performances during its limited run at The Kennedy Center, and you're going to want to buy a ticket. A group of five outrageously talented performers takes one audience suggestion for the title of a play that is yet to...

Synetic's The Tempest keeps the drama and comedy of Shakespeare's original work through the use of movement and emotional expression....

This production of Shakespeare's Othello has revelations galore, performed by an ensemble of actors whose comfort with the language and emotional power keep you riveted. Even if you've seen any number of Othello's beforea?'especially if you've seen a fewa?'the Riot Grrrls interpretation, as staged i...

Half the fun of TheNew One is getting to embrace the rollercoaster of parenthood with Mike Birbiglia, and to laugh while doing so. The other half is just feeling goodleaving the theatre. Now, when was the last time that happened to you?...

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....

In TRYING, Judge Biddle and Sarah do battle with the prejudices that stem from their 56-year age gap....

a?oeThe Memory Lives Againa?? at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the National Tour of CATS takes the Opera House Stage. CATS has been entertaining audiences all over the world since its Broadway debut in 1982. Now, the newly imagined, yet classic CATS invites us into the junkya...

With this production of Jitney you're not just watching a play; you are immersing yourself in Wilson's world. And what a rich world it is, with folks dropping in and out, gossiping, swiping at each other, arguing, plotting, dreaming. You come to know and love every one of them; that love, however, t...

Jackie Sibblies Drury's play, Fairview, currently playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, is a show that desperately calls for conversation. It's no wonder, then, that each performance is immediately followed by community discussions led by Build With, a DC-based anti-racist training, facilitatio...

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

It's common for the Kennedy Center to be a stop for national tours of current or recently closed Broadway shows, but it's a bit of a rarity for it to be a stop for a show that's truly a?oedirect from Broadway.a?? There's no misleading advertising here. While Heidi Schreck's highly personal Tony Aw...

Although it's an intense play, Surfacing is also incredibly thoughtful. In the manner of most good art, it takes difficult and abstract ideas and gives the people behind them a face and a voice. And, even though we don't know how these particular stories end, it's hard not to walk out of the theatre...

In Theater J's fall opening, we are asked to consider: what really happens when love makes you sick? And yet, despite a strong cast and well-executed technical elements, 'Love Sick' suffers from a slight disconnect....

Folger's 2019 Season opener deftly tells the tale of king's reign and the rebellion he faces, a prince burdened by expectations, and the struggles of family, honor, and duty. Rosa Joshi's production enchantingly revives this age-old tale with the help of stunning sets, expert staging, and a phenomen...

Soprano Amanda Palmeiro, now performing the title role at English language performances of Butterfly for the InSeries, deserves an opera career as sensational as her voice. Already a prize-winner at Met auditions, she'll perform Papagena with the Washington National Opera's Domingo Cafritz Young Art...

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 wher...

Doubt: A Parable, a fitting title if ever there was one. Jesus used parables to teach as does Shanley. His message that even though stories like that of Sister Aloysius and Father Flynn did happen, it's up to us to make sure they do not happen again....

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 belittl...

Signature Theatre and Stephen Sondheim have been a winning combination in the DC theatre scene since 1991when the company presented Sweeney Todd at Gunston. In 1992 it presented the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman collaboration known as Assassins. The show was produced again by Signature in 2006 in th...

Because infidelity and adultery have been so frequently deconstructed in theatre, film, television, and literature during the four decades since Nobel Prize and Tony Award winner Harold Pinter wrote Betrayal, the play's novelty has rather worn off. But that does not get in the way of this production...

4615 Theatre Company's Enron, directed by Jordan Friend, is an entertaining, satirical glimpse into a whirlwind scandal....

The phenomenon that got its start in DC at the Arena Stage in 2015 has come home to DC for a five week, sold out run at the Kennedy Center. DEAR EVAN HANSEN is the story of an anxious young man desperate to fit in, and the powerful musical is opening the conversation to a wider audience as it launc...