Big News at the Kennedy Center. Alvin Ailey’s American Dance Theater rocked the place last night.. And no one rushed to exit the Opera House auditorium (as they often do at the KC) until …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:06PMTo the degree that a creative artist can draw you into his world and make you follow him regardless, to merge with his very humanity, that is the measure of his worth. By this measurement, R…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:54PMChoreographer Alexei Ratmansky has created a dance-theatre piece that is part ballet, modern, and Russian folk dance with plenty of comical pantomime to share the much-beloved folktale of hi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:12AMAs I walked up the steps into Kennedy Center’s Opera House for the season’s opening of American Ballet Theatre’s Swan Lake, my heart was fluttering as if for a first love. As indeed it…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:04PMWashington National Opera announced its programming for the 2017/2018 season on Monday, almost three months earlier than usual. The upcoming season is all part of Kennedy Center’s continue…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:36PMWatching an opera take its first life breath is witnessing a high-risk birth. There were some serious devotees on hand at Kennedy Center’s Family Theatre to support Washington National Ope…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:04PMMonday night, Jon Fosse’s play felt like a blast of early Pinter with some hoary frost of Edward Munch thrown in for good measure. You know: a threesome locked for eternity in jealous t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AMAs the dimming lights turned the deep red walls of the Kennedy Center Opera House into darkness, the spiky celestial chandeliers seemed to glow with unusual brilliance, welcoming us i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:04AMIt takes a lot of balls but maybe not much brain to call a musical “Urinetown,” and the joke is made several times in the show just what a terrible name it is. But that’s the point.�…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AMTwenty-five years ago at the small Eureka Theatre in downtown San Francisco, Tony Kushner pushed forth the first iteration of a play that would become what many feel is not only a great Amer…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:39PMFor the past 25 years, Shakespeare Theatre Company (STC) has memorably gifted our community by remounting one of its recent favorite productions in free performances. These used to be per…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:13PM– Notes from the talk delivered by Susan Galbraith at The Smithsonian on August 16th – On a good day in the Greater Washington area there are more than 15 opera companies of vari…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:13PMIn 1692, Tituba and a gaggle of Puritan girls frolicked by night in the woods outside Salem and allegedly conjured up the devil, an event that embroiled the witnesses and a whole township in…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:28AMIs it true, as Stephen Sondheim insists, that mostly audience expectations dictate whether a work is to be experienced as an opera or a musical? When pushed, however, he is equally adama…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:51AMWell, this one’s for the birds! Full disclosure. I love a production that is steeped in fanciful storytelling. My background as a former teacher of theatre-movement makes me a sucker f…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:20AMIn a season where we’ve been hammered by political name-calling and divisive fearmongering, the threat of climate change and global terrorism, and protests and gun violence in hometowns ac…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:15AMUnder the magic of its yellow-and-blue striped tent, Cirque du Soleil has brought what may be its most rare and delightful show to date. Kurios reminds us that little and “oldie” can b…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:55PM22 Boom! sounded like a sure Fringe favorite. Advertising that it does 23 plays in 70 minutes, it promised something like a Fringe buffet. Light, clever, crisp entertainment, and funny, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:00PMDo Not Disturb is big as Fringe shows go -an ambitious chamber opera in fact, with 11 singers, 5 instrumentalists, plus stage and music directors. As in his previous work, the “hor…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:14AMUnless you have been living under a rock, you know the American musical has been redefined and re-colored by the talented Lin-Manuel Miranda and the phenomenon of Hamilton. Well, Danny Bair…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:32PMYou might think with a name like The Apocalypse of Darkness you’d be served up a screamingly funny horror flick send up, but creator/director Emanuel Wazar is deadly serious. Apocalypse i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:16PMIf Robert Louis Stephenson’s Storybook world were cooked up together with a fairy tale opera like Cinderella and spiced with the comedic talents of Carol Burnett in Once Upon a Mattress, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:40AMAs the story goes, when composer Andrew Lloyd Webber first sent his original recording of the Evita songs to Hal Prince to get the producer involved, Prince responded, “Any musical that …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:00PMShakespeare is an adventure with the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and especially when staged as a moveable feast in the Patapsco Female Institute Historic Park. Using the ruins of a once t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:22PMSometimes the best of the “best in art” sneaks up on you. So it was with Spoleto Festival USA’s 2016 season. Maybe this year it had to do with the fanfare around the Festival’s “…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:45AMSoprano Alyson Cambridge, who began her career here in Washington, DC and has gone on to perform on some of the major opera stages of the world including Washington National Opera. She is …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:21PMAlarm Will Sound presented a concert version of the opera The Hunger by Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy at the Kennedy Center Wednesday night. It is a most curious mash of video interviews …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:21AMThis year’s big fortieth anniversary event at Spoleto Festival USA was the long-anticipated new production of George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, as a celebration of the city that ga…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:15AMLast time I was here in 2013 I was swept into the flurry of opening celebrations, including the noontime grandstand with mayoral speeches and brass band and the late night garden party for s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:08PMHave you ever sat beside a lake at night and listened to the sounds? Or stood on an urban street corner in inky blackness or more exactly in a snowstorm where the world becomes unfamiliar in…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:18AMLouis Lovett is a teller of stories. From Ireland he is and he is simply grand. I have it on good authority from two smallish people and one not so smallish I met at the Kennedy Center last …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:26AM