“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 11:48AMI am generally not a forced gaiety and audience-participation kind of guy. And yet Saturday night, there I was some 20 minutes before show time for H.M.S. Pinafore, in Olney Theatre’s Muli…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:04PMThe painter Jacob Lawrence’s 60-panel Migration Series chronicles the exodus of more than six million African-Americans from the South to the North starting around 1916. The WPA-funded pro…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:12AMIt was 40 years ago that the Ballet Nacional de Cuba made its U.S. debut at the Kennedy Center and 30 years ago that it premiered its production of Don Quixote. It was 70 years ago that Alic…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:54AMBrevity is not the soul of Saint Joan’s wit. Even at three and a half hours’ running time, however, the George Bernard Shaw classic never flags in Bedlam’s funky, spunky, stripped down…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:04PM“I always think of our audience,” says Meg Booth, director of dance programming for the Kennedy Center. “There are always some attending their first performances, and subscribers of 20…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AMJustin Peck’s “Pulcinella Variations,” an ecstatic circus of the soul, made its sensational D.C. debut Tuesday in an altogether winning evening of mixed repertory by the New York City …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:32PM“With any new endeavor,” said Washington Ballet’s Artistic Director Julie Kent before Friday night’s performance, “there is an element of risk – and excitement.” The risk was i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:05PM“’Deru kugi wa utareru.’ Dad first said it to me. ‘The nail that sticks out is the one that gets hit.’ It’s an old Japanese proverb. To stay out of danger or harm’s way, one mu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:36PMThe Nunes memo, election tampering by Russia, the refugee crisis, mass shootings, harassment and molestation, Olympic doping, North Korean nukes, climate change, fascism, nationalism, racism…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:27PM“I hear you’re a son of a bitch,” said Jerome Kern, introducing himself to a producer. “So am I.” But he was one productive son of a bitch, composing more than 700 s…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:43AM“Life is not like your American movies,” says Lise, a ballerina who has captured the hearts of three men. “Why not?” asks one of those men, Jerry, an American soldier turned painter …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PMParting really is sweet sorrow as the Suzanne Farrell Ballet, after 17 years, offers its final performances this week. Its budget and company size have been unsteady, but you’d never know …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:33PMThere is finally something happening on Pennsylvania Avenue to bring Washington some bipartisan joy. No, not there. A couple blocks away, at the Warner Theatre, where Clara and her prince va…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:12PMPeter Pan and Captain Hook should see a therapist together. How can they not realize by now that their commonalities are greater than their differences? Both are childish, boastful, and untr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:04PMLove is tragic and sumptuous in the Mariinsky Ballet’s La Bayadère. At the Kennedy Center this week, under director Valery Gergiev and acting ballet director Yuri Fateev, the production �…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:12AMAmerica may be in a new cold war with Putin, but the Washington Ballet this week takes Russia into a white-hot embrace. In her first season last year as artistic director, former American Ba…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:24PMYour mission: Venture to the land of Adams Morgan until you see a temple at 16th and Fuller. From Fuller turn right at Mozart Place, past the construction, into the auto-gated parking lot. T…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:54AMThe Kennedy Center Thursday night featured Teutonic offerings across a wide spectrum. In the Concert Hall, the National Symphony Orchestra was performing Beethoven’s Ninth. Next door at th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:48PMIn a formidable and diverse program Tuesday night, the New York City Ballet juxtaposed affable athleticism with social and romantic tensions. The former was represented by two Balanchine cla…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:24PMChrist’s last mortal days are a “strange thing, mystifying” in Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 Jesus Christ Superstar. But as conceived by director Joe Calarco in Signature T…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:05AMLife flies by, jeering at our measly accomplishments, even as it drags on endlessly, hour after weary hour. Love is elusive and taunting. Loneliness is an ever-present scourge, but company i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:18PMWhat’s more invigorating than one boundary-pushing ballet company? Three! Wednesday’s audience at the Kennedy Center’s Ballet Across America series was treated to a varied and impressi…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:48AMHad I not seen Chicago’s run at the National Theatre eight years ago, maybe I’d consider the current production at the Kennedy Center great instead of good. But I did, so I don’t. The …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:18AMA tale of unrequited love is also a meditation on the anguish and ecstasy of art in Hamburg Ballet’s exquisite The Little Mermaid. The dance theater tour de force by John Neumeir, the comp…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:54AM“These people make me tense,” sings Leo Frank early in the dark musical Parade. “It’s like a foreign land.” If 1913 Atlanta feels alien to Frank, a transplanted New York Jew and th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:36PMLater this spring, the Washington Ballet will present 20th-century and contemporary works, as well as premieres, by choreographers including Jiri Kilyan, Justin Peck, William Forsythe, Georg…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PM
