At a historical moment when appalling new waves of gender fundamentalism sweep our nation, leaving bigotry and violence in their wake, it was beyond refreshing to hear the Gay Men’s Ch…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:11PMThe musical The Scottsboro Boys tells a true story of heinous injustice driven by race hate, and the theatrical form is a minstrel show—bouyant upbeat dancing, rousing melodic singing, and…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:32AMThe mystery at the center of this adroit drama keeps getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser: What’s in the small room at the top of the stairs? Playwright Carole Fréchette has crafted …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:59PMGoing back to Ancient Greece, theater has functioned as a forum for informed public debate—about war, religion, politics, all the issues relevant to the citizenry of the day. The Greeks ha…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:03PMAmong the rich offerings in The Kennedy Center’s Artes de Cuba festival were two extraordinary works of theater, each performed but twice: The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, from Teat…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:10PMThey have such a tasteful, immaculate, picture-perfect kitchen, how could their marriage be such a sorry mess? That’s a crass way to ask the question, but the answers are beautifully n…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:54PMI would not have thought that a play about dreadful disaster could be done as a droll and delightfully dark comedy, but Playwright Gabrielle Reisman did. Having lived through Hurricane Katri…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:51AMObsessional unrequited love is what prompts Petra von Kant’s bitter tears in the 1972 German film by Rainier Werner Fassbinder. The movie is a languid immersion in the self-absorption …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:01AMIn a tent pitched on a pier overlooking the Anacostia River, there is a powerfully important work of theater being performed. The work is The Frederick Douglass Project, commissioned to comm…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:40PMThe sudden incapacity of their mother is the occasion for three siblings and their cousin to gather at a Boston hospital in Amy Leigh Horan’s touching and perceptive new family dramedy…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:20AMIf KISS were starting out today, they’d be trying to get noticed on a streaming music site like Spotify. And followers would find their tour dates on apps like Bandsintown. Or maybe th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:24PMThe sheer magnitude of the concert event was enough to inspire wonder and awe. More than 200 musicians packed the Strathmore stage and a balcony above—two orchestras, three choirs, a rock …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:08PMThere is so much in this show to flip over, you could be dizzied by its delights. The fantastical story and kooky characters, the wicked humor and badass music, the frisky cast and musicians…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:16PMThe rock musical Girlfriend celebrates the tentativeness and exuberance of a budding romance between two gay teens in a small town Nebraska in the 1990s. Just after graduating from high sch…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:53AMTime has not been kind to Great Dead White Male Artists, poor things. Nosey feminist historians have been poking around in these guys lives and digging up dirt about how they treated women! …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:38PMBack in college in Minnesota, I was so into the forlorn films of Ingmar Bergman that I think he affected my mental health. I could relate to his bleak Nordic worldview, which I associated wi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:43PMOne of the most quietly profound moments in Athol Fugard’s anti-apartheid play “Master Harold”…and the Boys—just opened in a powerfully moving production at Round …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:26PMWith admirable nerve and imagination, Constellation Theatre Company has mounted an endlessly inventive production of a work by a playwright who dares us to enjoy him. Bertolt Brecht wrote pl…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:16AMTop and Bottom is a new gay comedy by Kevin Michael West and directed by Christopher Janson. It’s set in a hotel room where James, a wannabe “dom,” has planned an S&…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:08PMFor a Cirque-head such as myself, anticipation of a new Cirque du Soleil show coming to town kicked in months ago. It had been two long years since Cirque last pitched its Big Top here, with…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:10AMThis is an absolutely absorbing medical drama performed with full-on passion by two of DC’s top-tier actors. Susan Rome plays Roz, a hematologist dedicated to her role as healer, and T…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:21AMTa-Nehisi Coates’s son, Samori, was 15 when his father wrote a book addressed to him, Between the World and Me. Before that book won the National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:04PM“What the fuck was that?” a friend asked me at the opening night reception for this show at Woolly. To which, still reeling, I could only answer, “Yeah, what the fuck?̶…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:14PMPaper Dolls has such an open heart and such largesse of spirit that you might well leave the theater verklempt with hope. The play with songs by Philip Himberg, directed by Mark Brokow, tell…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:42PMNanna Ingvarsson is so phenomenal in these three harrowing short plays by Samuel Beckett that one can easily imagine the Nobel Prize-winning minimalist—notoriously persnickety about his st…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:57PMBy coincidence, Nat Turner in Jerusalem opened at Forum Theatre the day that The Raid closed at Theater Alliance. The two plays seen in succession are powerfully connected. Idris Goodwin’…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:17PMWith its snappy-saucy take on Chicago, The Keegan Theatre shows it knows how to give an audience the ol’ razzle-dazzle. And Keegan has done the durable musical proud. In fact in Keega…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:10PMBreathe is a brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed gospel musical that celebrates black resilience even as it revisits the traumas endured by the black family in a nation built on s…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:35PMDespite its occultish name, The Tarot Reading is not a cabalistic rite for mystics. It is actually an ingenious theater game for hipster questers who are psyched to play along. To be sure, t…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:46PMPost-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DC Metro Theater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:15AMI doubt the Eisenhower Theater was ever more queered than the night Taylor Mac came to town. The outrageously gifted and fabulously attired theater artist brought “a radical fairy real…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:18PM
