Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Robert Michael Oliver and John Stoltenberg saw and wrote about the same opening night performance of Lights Rise on Grace at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, but they seem not to have seen th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:56AMSunday, April 5, 2015
There be eerie goings-on inside the DC Arts Center black box where Molotov Theatre Group is staging a spell-binder of a show about a psychic experiment to create a ghost by occultish committ…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:14PMSaturday, April 4, 2015
Now playing at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company is a depiction of eroticism so intimate and artful that it left me woozy with awe and wonder. No one takes their clothes off. There are no phony…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:47PMMonday, March 30, 2015
So dere’s dis play goin’ on in town called Da Norvegians, and it’s set in Minneapolis and it’s got Norvegian characters in it, so I tought I should go check it out, on accounta I vas…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:38AMAfter Michael Poandl and John Stoltenberg, both DCMTA writers, saw a recent performance of Passion Play at Forum Theatre, they found themselves chattering back and forth trying to figure out…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:00AMFriday, March 27, 2015
You’d be hard pressed to find a better theatrical catharsis for high school angst than Dog Sees God, Bert V. Royal’s funny/poignant reimagining of characters from the Peanuts comic strip…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:21PMWednesday, March 25, 2015
The crowd that came to The Birchmere last night to See Jane Sing! got a great big ol’ cabaret show full of offbeat tunes and upbeat fun. Jane Lynch wowed ‘em with her artful blend of ag…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:00PMThursday, March 12, 2015
I had a wonderful time chatting with the multi-talented Jane Lynch. Jane: How are you, John? John: I’m good, thank you, Jane. I’m a complete Gleek. Good for you! My husband and I watch e…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:12PMMonday, March 9, 2015
In the words of Countess Aurelia, the title character in Jean Giraudoux’s comedy The Madwoman of Chaillot, ”Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can’t set right…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:10PMSarah Ruhl’s Passion Play is an epic three-part play set in three eras—Queen Elizabeth’s England, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and Ronald Reagan’s America. It’s a fancifu…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:17AMSaturday, March 7, 2015
If there is a post-9/11 theater in America—the way there was, for instance, a postwar theater in Europe—it just got bigger than before. A new play opened last night that offers a sharp n…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:08AMSunday, March 1, 2015
“You have no idea what I’ve been through,” says Luke early on in Kid Victory, the nervy and unnerving new musical by John Kander (music) and Greg Pierce (book and lyrics) that just ope…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:31AMSaturday, February 28, 2015
An update: I went back to see Clandestine Arts’ production of Bare last night (Friday, January 27th) and found the show even more enjoyable than the first time. The quality of music…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:55AMFriday, February 27, 2015
People rarely go to the theater anymore to know what a playwright thinks. We go to be entertained, we go to be moved, we go to be told stories, which might involve hearing what assorted char…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:18PMMonday, February 23, 2015
I knew I would be bummed if I missed the Round House Theatre production of Gina Gionfriddo’s Rapture, Blister, Burn. Everything I read told me, “John, you gotta see this.” So when I ca…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:37PMSaturday, February 21, 2015
A young new theater company called Clandestine Arts has come to town and marked its arrival by tackling the beautifully scored coming out musical Bare: A Pop Opera. With a spirited cast of 1…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:53AMFriday, February 20, 2015
There were many moments in Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Poe Lick Creek, as interpreted by Director Jodi Kanter at The George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dan…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:37AMSaturday, February 14, 2015
The connectivity crew at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates some of the most imaginative audience-engagement gimmicks in town. Typically tied to, and expressive of, the themes inside a p…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:00AMThursday, February 12, 2015
Anna Deavere Smith’s classic Fires in the Mirror is getting a fascinating production this weekend by a very talented ensemble of student actors at Howard University. And on two counts this…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:07AMWednesday, February 11, 2015
John Stoltenberg: It’s great that Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, and Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of Signature Theater, have initiated what will become the Women’s …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:17AMMonday, February 9, 2015
Martin McDonagh is one of my favorite living playwrights, and I’ve loved his black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore every time I’ve seen it. So for me the Constellation Theatre Company…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:51PMFriday, February 6, 2015
Each year at Valentine’s Day time, thousands of college and community groups around the world present staged readings and productions of The Vagina Monologues, by Tony Award–winning play…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:13AMSaturday, January 31, 2015
“I’m not dead, I’m just hurt real bad,” says Regina, a young woman whose life is a painful wreck, a sorry mess. She’s homeless, rejected and shut out, even by her mother. She is an…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:30PMWednesday, January 28, 2015
No girl grows up dreaming of terminating a pregnancy. There are plenty of aspirational fantasies out there—some good for her, some not—but to be in a situation where she decides to have …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:18PMTuesday, January 20, 2015
An intriguing question runs through Life Sucks (Or the Present Ridiculous), which is whether in fact life sucks or not. Is life inherently such a bummer that there’s no point going on? Or …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:10PMMonday, January 12, 2015
There comes a scene in Choir Boy at The Studio Theatre when five young black men stand naked in dimly lit separate shower stalls singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in glo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:08AMMonday, January 5, 2015
Natsu Onoda Power’s delightfully devised theater piece The T Party could not have a more perfect home than Michael Dove’s quintessentially inclusive Forum Theatre. At Forum every walk-up…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:33PMFriday, December 26, 2014
In the week following Ari Roth’s firing as Artistic Director of Theater J, I talked with him about his vision of theater. It was a topic that mattered to me personally, because I had come …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:52AMMonday, December 15, 2014
Graphic language can slam us and disturb us in a way that is unique to live theater. Visceral and muscular diction in performance can burn images into our mind’s eye as no cinema can. The …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:21PMWednesday, November 19, 2014
This is a big play,” the playwright Tony Kushner has said without understatement, and without an argument from anyone. It’s sprawling and sweeping and awesome in depth and breadth. It’…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:45PMSunday, November 16, 2014
Love and song go together so well they’re a compound noun. Who doesn’t love a love song? But what about love that is disappointing, unreciprocated, wounding—all the loves that dare not…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:47AM 
