WASHINGTON, DC THEATER REVIEWS

Kids are bombarded with big flashy images in pretty much every form of entertainment nowadays. Those of us that grew up with theatre for young audiences (TYA) companies such as New Jersey's Pushcart Players remember how storytelling used to drive the production as opposed to spectacle driving the st...

RAGTIME, currently playing at Ford's Theatre, hits a number of current, resonant themes across multiple notes with powerful ballads and a stellar cast. DC audiences, this is the show we need right now....

In the American premiere Fiona Doyle's COOLATULLY, Kilian (David Mavricos)is stuck in the village of Coolatully and has few prospects. Once the powerful champion of the hurling team, Kilian has watched so many of his generation leave for opportunities abroad that the tiny town no longer has enough y...

THE CIRCLE OF LIFE: THE SONGS OF TIM RICE IN CONCERT was nothing less than a case study in ambition....

All in all, I certainly commend Arena Stage, including Artistic Director Molly Smith, for taking a chance on this new work. Unfortunately, there's a ways to go to ready it for an audience, particularly here in DC where there is bound to be at least a handful of people with a pretty good understandi...

Inspired by (but not literally adapted from) Mary Shelley's 200-year-old novel Frankenstein, Idris Goodwin's FROM THE MOUTHS OF MONSTERS makes a powerful world premiere at the Kennedy Center's Family Theater. A two-actor play starring Shannon Dorsey and Tia Shearer in energetic, flexible roles, it s...

How To Succeed has always been on my list of musicals to see, but hadn't gotten the opportunity to experience, until I saw the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC's production at the beautiful and ornate Lincoln Theater. The original Broadway show ran for fourteen hundred performances and picked up t...

Bad singers make interesting stories. After Meryl Streep got an Oscar nomination for her role as the classical world's Florence Foster Jenkins, last year, here comes Broadway's Debra Monk, warbling the pop repertoire of a mid-1960s musical misfit in a new musical full of Great White Way pedigree....

Lee Breuer's The Gospel at Colonus took Sophocles' meditation on mortality, sin and redemption and brought it solidly into the American mainstream. This production of The Gospel at Colonus, revived by WSC Avant Bard under the inspired direction of Jennifer l. Nelson, is one of the most joyous experi...

Elevator Repair Service, a New York company with a decided literary turn, has brought its lengthy but satisfying staging of Hemingway's first novel, 'The Sun Also Rises,' to Shakespeare Theatre Company's Landsburgh stage for a healthy Washington run. For Hemingway fans, this is reason enough to make...

It's especially gratifying to see companies like Aura Curiatlas Physical Theatre return to Washington with a fascinating new work, A Life With No Limits, dedicated to the life and ideas of the Nobel physicist Stephen Hawking. Aura Curiatlas has developed a unique, intensely physical brand of perfor...

Opera Layfeyette presented LEONORE, OU L'AMOUR CONJUGAL in NYC at the Gerald W. Lynch Theater on February 23rd....

A mash-up between Super Mario and Checkhov's Uncle Vanya, Brother Mario is a weird little play and there is really no way around that. In Brother Mario, Flying V Theatre, Playwright Seamus Sullivan, and Director Paul Reisman deftly straddle the void between fringe and professional theatre....

Rooted in the moral conflict between society's thirst for justice and Christianity's tenet of forgiveness, the modern American opera DEAD MAN WALKING is an apt selection for the Washington National Opera this season. With a moving score by Jake Heggie and an honest, straightforward libretto by Terre...

Continuing his winning streak of taking classic fairy tales and turning them into hip-hop extravaganzas, writer/ director Psalmayne 24 has done it again with a futuristic take on Snow White. He has kicked our heroine into the year 3000, armed her with a graffiti device, and put her up against an evi...

Last weekend I visited one of my friends in the great theatre town of Boston; while there I got to see an exciting new play that by rights should be produced here in the Washington area, and soon. A new playwright, Leo McGann, born and raised in Belfast, has written 'The Honey Trap' and it is a work...

Let's say you want to think deeply about the origins of menstruation. Perhaps you would go to a lecture on evolutionary biology....

Starring and directed by award-winning Irina Tsikurishvili, Synetic Theater proves that Shakespeare's words are not the only memorable attributes of his plays with their modern, Hollywood-spoofing adaptation of THE TAMING OF THE SHREW....

Riot Grrls, the all-women arm of Taffety Punk Theatre Company, made the brilliant decision to take on THE TROJAN WOMEN, a play written by Euripides and translated into English by Edith Hamilton. Although the play itself is practically as old as time, the story remains jarringly relevant in today's ...

Are there parts of this play that are beyond silly? Yes. Do we need a play like that right now? You bet. PETER AND THE STARCATCHER at Constellation Theatre Company has a lot your inner child (and adult) will enjoy....

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Times like these call for plays that directly address our anxieties; and Mike Bartlett's King Charles III is about as timely and necessary a play as we're likely to see. For all its indulgent verbal sprawl the Shakespeare Theatre Company has served Washington theatre audiences superbly, with a stell...

Creative Cauldron's production of BLUES IN THE NIGHT, directed by Matt Conner, spotlights a strong four-person cast that delivers 26 songs by Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, and other early jazz legends. Backed by a live band led by Walter 'Bobby' McCoy and surrounded with a sultry set, these singers ...

Lillian Hellman's 1941 play WATCH ON THE RHINE isn't often produced, but it's certainly a relevant one in today's troubling times. As directed in the round by Jackie Maxwell at Arena Stage, it's probably one of the best examples of a scintillating, well-written script being brought to the stage by ...

I am reminded that one of the beauties of dance is not always to tell a story but to evoke an idea that lives on its own wild life within each member of the audience and echoes out into our individual, very real lives long after we leave the theatre--and Alvin Ailey does just that. ...