Monday, January 27, 2020
Carey Perloff’s opening scene of the staged adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s shattering novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, moves with breathtaking beauty. Two women in one direction and a m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03PMTuesday, January 21, 2020
It was a rare pleasure to share the stage at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center less than a week ago with colleagues who are also in the business of reviewing the perfor…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PMFriday, January 17, 2020
For many of us in the audience of UrbanArias’ new production, Glory Denied, the Vietnam War is not distant history. Like the characters in this opera by Tom Cipullo, we carry that war in…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:42PMMonday, January 13, 2020
2020 marks the 8th year of Washington National Opera’s showcase of new compositional teams working in the most specialized art form of opera in a rollout of three twenty-minute operas. It�…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PMMonday, January 6, 2020
In 1981, the once enfant terrible of stage and screen, Peter Brook, then seasoned into arguably the most formidable theatre director in the world, took the opera world by storm with his radi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:36PMFriday, December 20, 2019
Everyone has a special memory of their first musical. Mine was My Fair Lady. It had opened in London in 1958 on Drury Lane after taking Broadway by storm, and, as a young child living there,…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:03PMTuesday, December 10, 2019
I Take Your hand in Mine is based on the intimate letters written between Anton Chekhov at the end of his life and his wife Olga Knipper. It has come to the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PMMonday, December 9, 2019
When singer/musician/educator John Langstaff launched a seasonal celebration of early music in Boston back in 1971, comprised of song and general merriment that would bring community togethe…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:33AMMonday, November 25, 2019
Make no mistake about it, I had this guy pegged in the first two minutes: a bumbling, bald-headed bungler trying to string together a show based on his own hoarding. Worse, an amateur! My …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PMFriday, November 22, 2019
Celebrating Opera Lafayette’s twenty-fifth season, Ryan Brown has brought a rare and truly exquisite small gem of an opera to Washington audiences. To do so, Brown has left his more famili…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PMHow are we to recover from what divides us? How do we maintain hope in the face of catastrophe from climate crisis? Such questions are not new; in fact the clamor of them pounding for our at…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AMMonday, September 30, 2019
Synetic Theater opens its season with a remount of its 2013 hit The Tempest, complete with its stunning watery world creation, amphibian-like cast, pounding AMC decibel electronic score, and…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:24PMHow do you like your Shakespeare? Intimate. Intelligent. Intrepid. And, I’d also add fully integrated through emotional truth and delivery of the musical richness of Shakespeare’s lang…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:24PMMonday, September 16, 2019
Never underestimate the power of a classic to communicate across time, cultures, and language in new and urgent messaging. We have Producing Artistic Director Hugo Medrano, the longest servi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:18AMMonday, September 9, 2019
Every age gets to reassess the value of a work of art relative to its present times, and not just aesthetically but politically. Never more so than today. Sometimes in our society’s self-c…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:03PMMonday, July 29, 2019
The Glimmerglass Festival offers a unique opportunity to singers and audiences alike to be around living composers. The “live relationship” creates a work that breathes and where new dis…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:06PMFriday, July 26, 2019
Glimmerglass Festival has made a bold choice in re-mounting The Ghosts of Versailles, a complicated, multi-layered late 20th-century opera, as part of its 2019 season. Contemporary opera ten…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:42PMSunday, July 14, 2019
UrbanArias’ Artistic Director Robert Wood continues to push the envelope of what makes for contemporary opera. In Elvis Costello, the famous Brit pop singer/song writer, he has found a com…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:24PMFriday, July 12, 2019
The Band’s Visit shows why it’s a multiple Tony Award winner in its stop at The Kennedy Center. It’s a musical that grabs your heart with the most unlikely thing in the world of showbi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:54PMThursday, July 11, 2019
Rozina Kanchwala nails it: we in the U.S. live in a world of too many choices, where a girl can just ask Google to serve up a song instantly to match her mood. It’s a time when everyone is…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AMTuesday, July 9, 2019
A “new” production of La traviata shared the buzz opening weekend at Glimmerglass Festival. Nonetheless, as a co-production with Washington National Opera (and a handful of other opera c…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:42AMGlimmerglass Festival opened its 45th season with a sensational Show Boat. The musical, based on Edna Ferber’s novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi, could have been delivered …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:42AMMonday, June 3, 2019
Timothy Nelson has ended his first season as Artistic Director of In Series with a stunning and musically gorgeous production of The Tale of Serse. Like George Frideric Handel, the composer …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PMThursday, May 30, 2019
There are rare but important artistic experiences that serve as spiritual pilgrimages. This year, in a kind of riches of Grace, we have shared in two at Spoleto Festival. Compagnie Hervé Ko…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:06PMA sun-drenched morning greeted townsfolk and cultural tourists alike for the 43rd no-weather-spoiler day at this year’s Spoleto Festival Opening. People gathered in the street outside City…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PMWhile Spoleto Festival is perhaps best known for its cutting-edge premieres of opera, dance, and theater, it grants special dispensation periodically to productions by English language’s f…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PMHow often we, in our silos, get stuck in our own work and schedules. Even more, artists miss opportunities to be fed and inspired by the interplay of other arts forms. If released, dancers s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PMThursday, May 23, 2019
What makes someone a devoted opera fan? Is it the “gilterati?” If so, there was much in abundance Saturday night when the Washington National Opera hosted its Gala in the Opera House. …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:06AMFriday, May 17, 2019
There’s exceptional and important theater in Washington that too often gets overlooked. It doesn’t come nicely packaged in season subscriptions or heralding stars from that other theater…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PMWednesday, May 15, 2019
There’s something wonderful when two paintings by different creators “hang” side by side and seemingly begin a conversation. It feels that something rich and more than serendipity has …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:36PMMonday, May 13, 2019
Never doubt the sheer power or the relevancy of a great work of opera. All you need for the first are extraordinary musicianship by a conductor, superb singers, and a stage director who can …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PM 
