Wednesday, September 30, 2015
There’s a not-so-secret code in Theater for Young Audiences (TYA) productions. Whether you’re a parent/guardian or just someone interested in theater, you might read the synopsis of a TY…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:38PMFriday, August 21, 2015
Signature’s remounted musical The Fix puts the “nasty” in dynasty by skewering the nepotism and celebrity culture oozing from contemporary politics. If you’re a patron of Signatu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:08PMTuesday, July 14, 2015
The first thing to know about I Thought The Earth Remembered Me is that it isn’t a play, at least not in the traditional sense. The second thing to know is that this is the weird Fringe ex…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:51PM“Words don’t matter, it’s what they mean that counts,” says (though I may be slightly paraphrasing) a worldly, French-speaking prostitute in a legal brothel in North Dakota. That isn…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:08AMMonday, July 13, 2015
There’s an elephant in the room when Second City comes to DC -A Big Apple-shaped elephant. It says something when one of the best comedy troupes *outside of New York* comes to one of t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:46PMHave you ever looked back on some of the games you played as an elementary school child and thought, “What a terrible game for children! Whose idea was it to teach us such an unthinkingly …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:14AMMonday, July 6, 2015
Impossible! is more than just a concept and title for Happenstance Theater’s newest circus-oriented offering; it is the high bar of quality and aim that the ensemble and directors of this …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:26PMWednesday, June 3, 2015
One curiosity of the theater – though it is being seen more and more in film as well – is a script that has been translated from another language. When we watch a play in transla…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:28AMMonday, May 18, 2015
There are dreams—and then there are Dreams. Small dreams spring from the random synaptic firing trigger by the stresses of the brain’s day: dreams of teeth falling out or playing the pic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:13PMOne great thing about theater is that it is iterative, constantly being forged and reforged so it has immediate relevance to our social realities and problems. Major Barbara from Pallas Thea…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:37AMWednesday, May 6, 2015
Taffety Punk’s Hamlet, the First Quarto is the Bard’s masterwork as you’ve never seen it before. At least probably. The Punks’ new production grows from their experimental Bootleg se…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:55AMWednesday, April 29, 2015
How epic is the source material for The Fire and The Rain, the newest North American premiere of South Asian drama at Constellation Theater? Literally, the most epic. No hyperbole here, the …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:33AMTuesday, April 14, 2015
Whenever I’m developing a new play and the playwright (or director or cast) gets stuck on figuring out a particular moment, I tell them this: a play is called a play for a reason. You’re…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:54AMLast fall, when American Theatre Magazine published their annual list of “American Theatre’s Top 10 Most-Produced Plays Of 2014-15,” one play ruled them all: Christopher Durang’s Van…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:06AMThursday, April 9, 2015
The drive to Frederick was long, but the destination was worth it. Not just because Frederick may be the most adorable town in driving distance of DC, but also because that town is home to M…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:14PMWednesday, April 1, 2015
Would you go to prison for a play, to defend what that play said about the world? What would that play look like? You can see for yourself at MetroStage in Alexandria, with Athol Fugard̵…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:16PMTuesday, March 24, 2015
What object best represents Man of La Mancha, the newly opened musical at Shakespeare Theater Company? Maybe a stylish and well-fitting pair of jeans with rivets on the seams. Perhaps a clas…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:53PMMonday, March 23, 2015
History’s habit of repeating itself comes with a twist in Freedom’s Song: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, now playing at Ford’s Theater. The play is essentially a museum piece made …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:03PMWednesday, February 25, 2015
Hip-hop is always hungry. Like the katamari of video game fame or the doubly insatiable hippos of the childhood tabletop game, hip-hop music and culture has absorbed (and remixed and made it…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:54AMThursday, February 12, 2015
Almost 30 years ago, Bob Fosse collapsed after rehearsals for a revival of Sweet Charity not two blocks from the National Theater, where I saw a piece of his legacy last night: the most rece…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:04AMTuesday, February 10, 2015
Olney Theater’s plan for their new rendition of Godspell, which opened this past weekend, was simple but effective: gather some of DC’s best powerhouse vocal performers and pour them all…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:16PMFriday, January 30, 2015
Arena Stage’s newest world premiere by Ken Ludwig, Baskerville, is a rollicking comedy where 3 actors play 30+ characters in a jam-packed 2 hours of farcical fun. Heading to the back offic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:42AMTuesday, January 27, 2015
I sat down with playwright Madhuri Shekar at Signature Theatre, where her play In Love and Warcraft ran in the ARK until January 25th. We’d done the getting-to-know-you thing: She’s from…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:31PMThursday, January 22, 2015
I’m head-over-heels in love with this play. We all know the pain of age or overwork or of desperately loving someone with whom you could never share a kiss. It aches and it sucks. But all …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:37PMFriday, January 16, 2015
When most audience members think of design in theater, their mind goes straight to the set. It’s easy to do, since the set is often a production’s most dominant and drastic change to a t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:55AMTuesday, January 13, 2015
Ask any playwright and they’ll tell you that the only thing harder than writing a play is getting someone to produce it. Playwrights often jump through some pretty humiliating hoops just t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:15AMFriday, January 2, 2015
“I’m here to see the Trouts.” Not a phrase I had uttered before. But in the near-empty seats of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company’s space, they were there. Trouts in the seats. Thre…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:47AMWednesday, December 31, 2014
“Things fall apart,” as Yeats said, and sometimes it seems like there is nothing we can do about it. The theater community watched a falling apart recently at Theater J with the abrupt f…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:58AMMonday, December 22, 2014
When I first spied Theater Alliance’s 2014/2015 season, I was intrigued by their Christmas show: Black Nativity by Langston Hughes. Hughes was one of the most celebrated playwrights fr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:16PMSometimes, you get to see a play where the expectations are all laid out for you. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, now playing at the Kennedy Center, is that type of show, setti…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:59AMTuesday, December 16, 2014
The first thing to know about Beauty and the Beast, Synetic’s newest fairy tale offering in Crystal City, is not what the production is, but what it isn’t. When buying your tickets, auto…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:58AM 
