WASHINGTON, DC THEATER REVIEWS

Happenstance's ensemble is chock full of talents, and when combined in a show like this it is impossible not to smile the whole way through. For kids you have slapstick, bad puns and the occasional chance for audience participation (we can make it rain, people). For adults you have visual puns from ...

Anytime a company presents something I don't expect to see in a festival setting, it generally peaks my interest. The Laramie Project is one of those shows I never thought I would see performed in Capital Fringe. When The Wandering Theatre Company presents the piece and then disrespects the material...

Oblivion is about the emptiness that plagues modern life, and the desperate attempts we make to fill that emptiness with something, anything, regardless of how illusory. Director Christopher Goodrich has assembled a dynamite cast, and the intimate environment at the River Road Unitarian Universalis...

Horton Foote's NIGHT SEASONS, directed by Jack Sbarbori at the Quotidian Theatre Company, examines the nature of a life defined by money and greed, and the notion that perhaps living is the greatest punishment of all. Foote, best known for his 1962 screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird, delivers a qu...

The current national tour, based on the recent Broadway revival at Roundabout Theatre Company's Studio 54 and taking up residence at the Kennedy Center through August 6, does just that - explore and provide a unique take. While there's never been anything particularly cheery about the musical, this...

THE ORIGINALIST at Arena Stage introduces Antonin Scalia as "the most polarizing figure in American civic life." When a liberal Harvard Law grad ("I fall in the flaming category") clerks for the justice, she encounters both maddening combatant and sage mentor....

LiveArtDC is unpredictable; grassroots theatre at its best. Clara Bow: Becoming 'It' is their Capital Fringe Festival 2017 offering....

Love and Other Lures is a truly original, DC-based (there's good monster-watching here) comedic enterprise with the capacity to just keep giving to anyone who craves an alternate reality in which love with a monster is possible, if deadly....

I'm Margaret Thatcher, I Is! is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of comedy for the comedian's sake. And if they're having fun, you're having fun too....

I recall with reverence the illustrated cover of the original cast album of MY FAIR LADY by the acclaimed caricaturist, the late Al Hirschfeld (who has a Broadway theater named in his honor). It featured the author of 'Pygmalion' which MY FAIR LADY is based on, George Bernard Shaw, overlooking a clo...

WOWEE WOW WOW!! Junie B. Jones and all of her friends are inhabiting Adventure Theatre this summer for a fun-filled tale of missing gloves, true loves, and fast feet. Fueled by a super colossus performance from pint-size dynamo Megan Graves in the title role and helmed by master director Rick Hammer...

The DC premiere of WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND UNAFRAID directed by Marie Byrd Sproul in her Keegan Theatre directing debut is nothing if not timely. The play is set on Whidbey Island off the cost of Washington State in 1972, but the remote location and blaring seventies music only highlights the eerie r...

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 ...

Unlike in your real life, there is someone onstage able to give voice to your concerns and make you laugh when you feel like you want to cry. The Second City wants you to know you're not alone!...

Imagination Stage's production, directed by Kathryn Chase Bryer) takes elements of Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and adds a bit of his poem, 'The Jabberwocky' to create a musical filled with catchy rock and roll tunes....

The cast and the rocking band pour every ounce of energy into everything they do....

Is this a rave? You bet your favorite things it is! Refreshing, revived, and ridiculously entertaining, THE SOUND OF MUSIC, now playing at the Kennedy Center through July 16 is a dream come true. Director Jack O'Brien has breathed new life into this Rodgers and Hammerstein classic with vibrancy, an ...

Simply put, get thee to the Kennedy Center to experience it for yourself....

The Mosaic Theaatre Company closes its second season with a perfectly realized and humane play about real life in the Middle East precisely 50 years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank....

How I Learned What I Learned was originally intended as a way for August Wilson to share the many colorful, real-life characters that informed his work. With Wilson's passing, others have stepped up to represent on his behalf; and Roundhouse is blessed to have Eugene Lee, a veteran of many of Wilson...

The beloved children's classic and vintage film musical THE WIZARD OF OZ has been enthralling audiences for decades. Creative Cauldron is doing its part to keep the magic of L. Frank Baum's story and the tuneful adaptation we all know and love alive with a magical production that puts a spell over t...

A starry night, with a huge moon looking down, is the perfect setting for an evening of songs that have become part of musical theatre history. This is the look and the sound of SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, now running through July 16, 2017, at the Riverside Center for the Performing Arts, just south of ...

At its core, Mollye Maxner's 'Still Life with Rocket' is one of those complex, emotional theatrical dramas that grow out of an uneasy reunion, where cracks in the family unit become increasingly and tragically clear. After its secrets are revealed, there's a climax from which no one can return....

Flying V has become the premiere forum for stage fights in the DC area, and the creativity in their 'Flying V Fights' series has never been more awesome or delightful. This year's entry, 'The Secret History of the Unknown World,' sees co-directors (and co-founders) Jason Schlafstein and Jonathan Ezr...

For three decades, the In Series has been presenting intimate, small scale works - what it calls 'pocket operas' on a variety of stages in the city....