One lesson of “Penelope”—both the new musical now running at Signature Theatre and the woman at its center—is that it is important to choose one’s partners well. Penelope is define…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 06:21PMIf society treats soldiers as machines and war as a game, should it be a surprise when those soldiers lose their humanity? That is the question at the core of the startlingly original produc…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 06:39PM“The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company,” a devised work presented by the Theater Alliance at the Anacostia Playhouse, is a vibrant and energetic production stuffed with music, storyt…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 08:59PM“Measure for Measure” is a problem play. “Desperate Measures” is a problematic musical. To be sure, director Allison Arkell Stockman’s current production at Constellation Theatre C…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 08:24PMDirector Morgan Duncan’s production of Patricia Milton’s “The Victorian Ladies’ Detective Collective” at the Washington Stage Guild is a spirited and impeccably performed show that…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 06:49PMDaryl Cloran’s adaptation of “As You Like It” may not be the absolute best of the several dozen shows I’ve seen at the Shakespeare Theatre Company over the past decade or so, but it …
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 05:08PMThere’s an adage that states that no one on their deathbed ever said, “I wish I’d spent more time at work.” It encapsulates the theme of “An Irish Carol,” a charming but flawed o…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 01:47PMWhen “Arms and the Man” opened in the West End in April 1894, George Bernard Shaw found himself called onto the stage after the curtain to receive a cavalcade of applause. The response s…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 10:29PMIn 2008, a new musical appeared on stage in Victoria, British Columbia. Ambitiously called the second work in the “Uranium Teen Scream Trilogy” (the first was a novel and one-act play an…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 07:32PMThere’s no stage, and it does not take place in a theatre. There are no actors, or at least none that can be seen. There is no set and there are no costumes, save those in the audience’s…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 01:05PMTheatre for young children is deceptively hard to do well. It may seem like simple stories would be the simplest to tell, but it requires great skill to craft such stories in ways that are c…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 05:15PMThe Capital Fringe Festival has changed a lot since the days of Fort Fringe and long afternoons at the Baldacchino Tent Bar. The artists behind “TBD: A Devised Theatrical Celebration/A Mus…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 12:40PMThe publicity for “Attack on Tunggorono” is compelling, which accounts for the full house on the evening I attended. But well before the end of the show, several patrons had quietly slip…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 10:45AMShaun Michael Johnson’s “I could have set the world on fire” is the rare play that is both too long and too short. The play takes us inside the hospital room of Ernest Williams (played…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 10:54AMIt’s a winter night in Paris in 1926. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one year removed from the publication of his breakout hit “The Great Gatsby,” is churning out short stories for publication t…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 12:38PMMartha Mitchell is having a moment. In April 2022, a well-reviewed limited series about the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, with Julia Roberts in the lead, began to air. Tw…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 11:02AMThe 16th Capital Fringe Festival kicked off Wednesday evening with a true showstopper: a corpse on the Theater J stage. For the next 50 minutes, a crack team of local improvisers tried to fi…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 04:47PMIt has been a decade since the Elden Street Players, an all-volunteer community theatre located in a nondescript office park in Herndon, took a leap of faith and reinvented itself as NextSto…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 10:28PMPart of the magic of Lumina Studio Theatre is that it mounts serious, artistically thoughtful productions of complex works with a young cast of all ages and makes it work for all of them and…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 12:42PMThe fast-paced and energetic “Push the Button” is making its world premiere at the Keegan Theatre. The hip-hop musical emerged from Keegan’s Boiler Room Series, an incubator for works …
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 04:30PMImagination Stage has a well-earned reputation for presenting innovative children’s theatre that does not talk down to its audience. It continues to impress with “The Hula-Hoopin’ Quee…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 04:08PMWashington Stage Guild has mounted a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame” that is more than satisfactory in its parts. The acting, direction, and set and sound design are all top-n…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 03:22PMFive years ago, NextStop Theatre Company presented “45 Plays for 45 Presidents,” (read our review here), a collection of super-short plays about each of the men who had served in the nat…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 02:57PMThe actor playing Nina in a production of “The Seagull” trips over one line and forgets another. Her scene partner tries to cover for her. She stumbles through another line or two, then …
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 02:14PM“The Outsider” by Paul Slade Smith feels unstuck in time. First performed in 2015, the politics of this agreeable, light satire are those of 2008, and the tone and style evoke smart sitc…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 03:20PMBlue Man Group is, as the Kennedy Center website says, a “phenomenon.” Created in New York in 1987, Blue Man Group has performed for more than 35 million people on multiple continents, w…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 08:56AMCapital Fringe perseveres. Two years after the pandemic led to the cancellation of the 15th annual festival, Fringe has returned—a bit smaller, a bit quieter, but alive and unbowed. If the…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 05:17PMMichael Seebold’s “Etched Glass Decanter” evokes Edgar Allan Poe or the darker works of Neil Gaiman. The 70-minute play takes place in an obscure universe where dream logic prevails an…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 05:08PM“Is this legal?” “More or less!” Welcome to the weird world of D.C. marijuana gifting. In the District of Columbia, every law comes with an asterisk. The Council can overturn a measu…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 04:58PMIf you laugh at the abyss, the abyss laughs back at you. Samuel Beckett was the funniest of the existentialists who took European thought by storm after the horrors of Nazism and the Second …
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 02:29PMIn addition to being a prolific playwright, Lauren Gunderson is also one of the nation’s best ambassadors for science. Works like “Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonig…
SOURCE: mdtheatreguide.com at 02:17PM