Wednesday, January 22, 2020
There are moments when art and life are so wittily and intimately entwined, you can feel the vibe without a word being said. Given the joyful display of color and power at this weekend’s W…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:39PMMonday, December 16, 2019
There are many joyous traditions this time of year, but to my mind the most indispensable has become Black Nativity. With its spiritual values on its finely-woven sleeve, it’s a show that …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:18PMMonday, December 9, 2019
The lights reveal a figurine on a pedestal—regal, decked head to foot, shimmering, amid the mist. Slowly, cautiously, with a twitch here and a jerk there, that figurine—the Snow Queen—…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:35PMSunday, November 17, 2019
The Silver Spring Black Box Theatre, situated in the same block as the Fillmore and AFI, has a lot to offer us. Live entertainment, yes, but more importantly entertainment that is personal, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:33PMMonday, November 11, 2019
The plays of George Bernard Shaw are, to be honest, an acquired taste. Erudite in the extreme, filled with Shaw’s unique sense of his own intellectual superiority—which is expressed with…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:56PMWednesday, November 6, 2019
First, dear reader, a confession—for which I fully expect to be pilloried, drawn and quartered, then maybe burned at the stake: I’m not a huge fan of musicals these days. Yeah, I know,…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:02AMMonday, November 4, 2019
Of all of Shakespeare’s history plays, Antony and Cleopatra is the most complicated and thankless to stage. You’ve got shifting alliances, battles won then lost, and then you’ve got th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:47PMYou know you’re in for a new take on Julius Caesar when the famous Soothsayer (“Beware the Ides of March!”) doesn’t enter upstage right or left, as usual, to make his warning. In Eth…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:22PMSaturday, October 12, 2019
Two clowns open a suitcase. In that suitcase lies a rope. A long rope. They start to play with it, tug-of-war stuff, with the loser pretending he’s winning. Lotsa yuks. Then the twist. And…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:25PMFriday, October 11, 2019
Ballet, like opera, has a love-hate relationship with its 19th-century repertoire. Contrived plots, truly embarrassing cultural stereotypes, crowd-pleasing but horribly dated choreography th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:48PMMonday, July 15, 2019
New companies, and especially hybrid troupes whose members have a variety of artistic origins and talents, are a vital part of DC’s theatrical ecosystem. The past few years have seen the l…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:39PMFriday, July 12, 2019
One of the more common phenomena of fringe festivals like ours is to see young actors commit to intensely personal projects, creating a cohesive performance piece that celebrates and reflect…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:34PMLast year, Shaun Michael Johnson put himself on the map as a master storyteller, whose protean moves captivated audiences at the Capital Fringe Festival with Sobriety of Fear, a compelling s…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:01PMThursday, July 11, 2019
Aficionados of modern dance and movement theatre take note: if you are hungry for something unique, abstract and poetic, get thee to the Plum space at Arena Stage for A Short History of Unfo…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:53PMWednesday, July 10, 2019
So here’s the deal: the card game 52 Pickup is, technically, not a game so much as it is a mess. You grab a deck of cards, say “52 pickup!” and scatter the cards every which way. …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:22PMMonday, July 8, 2019
Given the seemingly endless parade of creeps and pervs we see in the news every day, it might seem surprising that a woman would write a sympathetic play about guys. The kind who think of th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:01PMSunday, July 7, 2019
Ah, the perfect relationship – not yours, of course, never yours. I’m talking about the one that other couple has; you know who I’m talking about, they’re always such great fun, alwa…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:25PMOne of the true gems at this July’s Contemporary American Theatre Festival (CATF) in Shepherdstown, West Virginia is the premiere of Joseph Dougherty’s battle of heart and wit, Chester B…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:51PMSaturday, June 22, 2019
They’re at it again. The Happenstance Gang: troublemakers, every stinking one of ‘em. And this time, they’re going Greek. Mythologically speaking, that is. Nix on the keggers and beer …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:26PMWednesday, May 22, 2019
For nearly 30 years, the Contemporary American Theater Festival in nearby Shepherdstown, West Virginia has offered audiences some of the most breathtaking, insightful and pointed dramas you�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:44PMMonday, March 11, 2019
Of all the grand tear-jerkers, those epic romances that make you want to tear your heart out and roast it on the barbecue, Tchaikovsky’s masterpiece Eugene Onegin stands out. Packed with b…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:46PMTuesday, February 12, 2019
As the clouds have gathered over the past two years, we have witnessed the coarsening of our politics as one party promotes an increasingly strident brand of nationalism, corruption, and inc…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:09AMFriday, January 4, 2019
If you’re a fan of stand-up comedy, you know the highs and lows that come with artists working the crowd with fresh material they’ve been practicing for weeks. With their eyes on you and…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:18AMFor all his brilliance, Shakespeare still suffers from the occasional whining of critics about his later “problem” plays. Longer and more complex, with familiar plot lines splintered and…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:56AMThursday, January 3, 2019
We all have our own holiday traditions – lighting candles one night after the next, caroling, choral concerts, dreidel-spinning, Christmas Revels, Christmas-day Chinese fare, etc.—and th…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:20PMSunday, September 16, 2018
If you want to get yourself in the mood for the Folger Theatre’s current hit production of Macbeth – a famous adaptation from the 1660’s of William Shakespeare’s original tragedy, by…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:00AMThursday, July 12, 2018
Aficionados of ancient tragedy will tell you that the main difference between the Romans and the Greeks was that the Romans –Seneca, especially—loved their violence served up downstage c…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:09PMLet’s stop for a moment to consider how much of the grey matter we’ve got upstairs, between those infernal ears, is dedicated to memory. Even as you read this review your mind is stock…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:10PMDystopias can be off-putting places, for those in search of more traditional fictional locales. Why would you want to begin your story in a wasteland, where everything we associate with civi…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:22PMTruth be known, there is much about Ronald Reagan that is eminently unlikeable: his shameless embrace of the southern, “State’s Rights” strategy, his contempt for social welfare progra…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:57AM“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” –William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun. Of the many great moments in the late August Wilson’s Twentieth Century cycle, the most po…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:16AM 
