Monday, December 21, 2020
An old-fashioned black-draped dressing mirror is the only prop in the moody, elemental, but by no means elementary “Fuego Flamenco XVI: Intimo,” presented by GALA Hispanic Theatre. The m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PMWednesday, February 5, 2020
Technically, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s evening at the Kennedy Center Opera House Tuesday was a performance. But following a pre-concert gala, with an audience in sparkling gowns…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PMThursday, January 30, 2020
The National Ballet of Canada presented an exotic bouquet of contemporary choreography Tuesday by William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, and Alexei Ratmansky. The works, all but one performed to mus…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:36AMThursday, January 23, 2020
It seems like just yesterday that Matthew Bourne’s groundbreaking reinterpretation of a classic triggered gents to walk out at the sight of two men partnered and young girls to cry when co…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:33PMWednesday, December 18, 2019
A brilliant musical can only be cheapened by a surfeit of screen effects and novelty casting. But Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is a mediocre musical, brilliantly packaged, and it benefits ni…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:24PMFriday, December 13, 2019
The husband and wife team Irene Sankoff and David Hein’s sole theater credit a decade ago was a Toronto Fringe Festival breakout called My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding. Before …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:54PMThursday, December 5, 2019
Alakazam! See a middle-aged man regress to a bug-eyed, slack-jawed 10-year-old while watching eight magicians! So it was Tuesday night as the Illusionists brought their latest production to …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:06AMFriday, November 15, 2019
The deconstruction of a cultural touchstone by an acclaimed choreographer is an appealing notion, all the more so to live music. But although it was superbly performed Wednesday night, Mark …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:33AMWednesday, November 13, 2019
There were, at various points, half a dozen versions of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus floating around. The playwright was trying to square the circle and make his metaphorical work about the tra…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:03PMThursday, November 7, 2019
In theory, Dhana and the Rosebuds, a theater-dance hybrid about a Syrian emigree seeking her refugee grandmother, should be compelling. It is topical. Its wedding of abstract and ritualized …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PMThursday, October 10, 2019
How shocked must Jimmy Buffett have been when “Margaritaville,” his ode to heartbreak and mid-grade alcoholism, became not just a breakout 1977 hit but a potent lifestyle brand? It’s a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PMFriday, October 4, 2019
Eleven dancers in white unitards with horizontal black strips at the top extending to gloved hands. In a dawn of pastel light, they hold a marvelous stillness. Four musicians play a minimali…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:12PMSaturday, September 21, 2019
Recent research has shown that humans’ domestication of dogs has altered canines’ brains. I have a theory — it has not yet been borne out by science, but I am confident that it will be…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:12AMFriday, June 21, 2019
The irresistible paradox of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is its gritty transcendence. It is grounded but out of body, a free-floating passage through a quotidian …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:48PMThursday, June 20, 2019
In David Lindsay-Abaire’s Ripcord, there are two odd couples. The first are roommates Abby and Marilyn at the Bristol Place Senior Living Facility. The second are the farce and melodrama c…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:24PMFriday, June 14, 2019
For the South of Evan Linder’s play Byhalia, Mississippi, both the American flag and the Confederate one should be replaced by one reading “Bless This Mess.” It’s racist, classist, m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:32PMMonday, June 10, 2019
A quarter-century ago, C. Brian Williams, who’d honed his step-dancing skills as a member of Alpha Phi Alpha at Howard University, was visiting South Africa at the dawn of the Nelson Mande…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:18PMThursday, March 28, 2019
“The saddest thing in life is wasted talent,” Lorenzo the bus driver tells his son, Calogero, in A Bronx Tale. There’s no wasted talent in the rock-solid touring production of the musi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:47AMWednesday, March 6, 2019
“Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place,” writes the Victorian novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, “full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.” The ti…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:02PMSaturday, February 23, 2019
The 1990s were a percussive decade. New York brought in ’da Noise and ’da Funk and Stomped even as the Blue Men thrumbed their melodic PVC tubes. Meanwhile, in Australia, steel fitter tu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:48PMFriday, February 1, 2019
If you’ve got a case of the polar-vortex blues, Signature Theatre has the prescription for you: a two-hour extended-release burst of high-wattage, endorphin-pumping rhythm, courtesy of one…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PMWednesday, January 30, 2019
The Screwtape Letters, in a touring revival at the Lansburgh Theatre, is a polished, imaginative rendering of a tedious, self-righteous play. The acting and production values in this polishe…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:32PMThursday, January 17, 2019
Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, at the Kennedy Center’s Opera House through Sunday, is brilliantly imagined and executed. Forget your Disney conceptions, or even the Rostislav Zakharov or F…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:06PMMonday, December 17, 2018
The Vietnam War ended 45 years ago, and Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s Miss Saigon debuted almost 30 years ago, but the musical, in a riveting touring production at the Kenned…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PMThursday, December 6, 2018
What’s more seasonally entertaining than the country’s oldest continuing production of The Nutcracker? Sprucing it up with new finery that enhances the company’s fabulous performances.…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:42PMWednesday, November 7, 2018
A country divided, tensions running high. That was Tuesday evening in America on midterm election night. It was also mid-1980s England in Signature Theatre’s production of Billy Elliot. Wo…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:42PMFriday, November 2, 2018
Pour Disney princess movies, Nicholas and Alexandra, Dr. Zhivago, Annie, My Fair Lady, and An American in Paris in a mixer, hit blend, and you’ll end up with Anastasia, a historically and …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PMThursday, October 25, 2018
A meditation on the arc of a lifetime. A message piece about soul-eroding communication technology. A frenetic exploration of Jung’s notion of male and female psychic elements. Such was th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:24PMTuesday, September 11, 2018
Giuseppe Verdi revered Shakespeare and wrote a Macbeth, an Otello, and a Falstaff. He longed to write a King Lear as well and even worked with two librettists toward that goal. But although …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:32PMMonday, September 10, 2018
Was ever a message musical wrapped in such a luxurious bounty of romance? Those love songs! Seventy years later, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific still floors us with its lyricism.�…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PMFriday, August 24, 2018
“These violent delights have violent ends / And in their triumph die, like fire and powder / Which, as they kiss, consume.” Friar Lawrence’s words ring pulse-quickeningly true in Shake…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AM 
