Wednesday, February 6, 2013
The characters in John Patrick Shanley’s “Italian American Reconciliation” appreciate the minestrone at their local diner. Watching them relish their soup in the version of the play no…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 05:41PM“This is starting to feel like an Indiana Jones movie or something!” a character exclaims in Spooky Action Theater’s “Kafka on the Shore.” There is, certainly, a swashbuckling adve…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 02:55PMMonday, February 4, 2013
Don’t be deceived by that expletive basking in the title, or by the profanity-riddled sarcasm and bluster that is the characters’ default communication mode: There’s an element of roma…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:12PMTuesday, January 8, 2013
The empty picture frames that hover in the background of the Washington Stage Guild’s “Tryst” seem ever more apt as this suspense drama unspools. For starters, George Love, the con man…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 05:48PMWednesday, December 19, 2012
Somewhere, a savvy media mogul is surely planning a “Les Miserables” theme park, complete with a Sewers of Paris log-flume ride; a “Look Down! Look Down!” parachute drop; and a “Ma…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:46AMWednesday, December 12, 2012
If you were to ease into a life of benign criminality, you could do worse than to land a guide like Edward Zanni. The hero of “How I Paid for College,” an amusing but unmemorable monolog…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 02:53PMMonday, December 10, 2012
Is there room on your smartphone for a soul-sensor app? You might hanker for one after attending “Altar Boyz,” the musical that’s larking about at 1st Stage in Tysons Corner. The show�…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:30AMWednesday, December 5, 2012
Snapshots of families you barely know tumble out of the red and green envelopes in your mail. Hackneyed carols cloy the air in supermarkets. The average Starbucks smells like a nutmeg empori…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 01:48PMTuesday, November 27, 2012
Things are getting busy in the Jungle of Nool — and we’re not just talking about the selfless missions of Horton the Elephant, the mischief of the Wickersham monkeys and the meddling ant…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 07:25PMMonday, November 26, 2012
Plucky pioneers, medicine-show hucksters, a Union Army balloonist and other colorful figures from America’s past are bustling through two local children’s productions. Over in Glen Echo,…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 05:23PMWednesday, November 21, 2012
Would you like a side of pseudo-profundity with your serving of lurid melodrama? If so, I have the theatrical repast for you: “Jekyll & Hyde,” the overheated and nuance-free musical …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:50PMMonday, November 12, 2012
You have to take solace where you can find it. For Chandra, a Navy bride whose honeymoon was interrupted by the U.S. military’s surge in Iraq, there’s consolation in waving sage-and-lave…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:32AMWednesday, November 7, 2012
A white picket fence is all very well, but that emblem of middle-class aspiration can’t shut out the past. And it’s no defense against moral accountability. Those thoughts might fleet th…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:55PMMonday, November 5, 2012
At one point in local writer Bill Goodman’s new play, a kindly flying instructor tells an anxious new student that her first-ever solo flying stint was graceless and inept. Would that one …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:25PMFriday, November 2, 2012
The adroit and tangy puppet show “The Dybbuk Between Two Worlds” tells of a spooky tug-of-war between the natural and supernatural realms. But the “two worlds” of the title could als…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 03:14PMWednesday, October 31, 2012
Sand spills from a jug held by a whirling woman. Sand sluices over the still, prone body of a man. Sand cascades from dozens of plastic bags that dangle in the air like broken hourglasses. A…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:13PMThursday, October 18, 2012
Hugh Masekela’s trumpet becomes a mining drill in “Songs of Migration,” the tuneful, quietly stirring musical tribute running through Saturday at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:47PMWednesday, October 17, 2012
Forget the green-eyed monster: Othello should look out for the guy with the red clown nose. Dominican theater artist Claudio Rivera dons such a nozzle for “Otelo . . . Sniff,” his 7…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:54AMFriday, October 12, 2012
The Yuletide season was not designed to bruise and batter the human spirit, but sometimes it has that effect. Just look at Rachel, the chirpy wife and mom who flees her home in terror on Chr…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:56AMThursday, October 4, 2012
Saint Simeon spent years living atop a pillar, the story goes. Saint Anthony of Egypt withdrew to the desert. Could they have chosen those routes to holiness because they lived prior to the …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:27PMMonday, September 17, 2012
They’re not quite Beatrice and Benedick, or Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy. Still, an appealing antagonism waxes and wanes between Carlos, count of Urgel, and Diana, princess of Barcelona,…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 03:00PMWednesday, September 12, 2012
You wouldn’t want him vetting texts for libel, or drafting your will. You certainly wouldn’t want to find him near a courtroom. Pale and tongue-tied, with a precariously knotted bow tie …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 06:14PMThursday, August 9, 2012
The folks at 1-800-FLOWERS must be grateful there aren’t more Violet Westons. Violet is the flakily savage matriarch at the heart of “August: Osage County,” Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Pr…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:31PMFriday, July 27, 2012
You’ll find a photograph on your chair when you walk into “A Year of Giving,” an engaging and often funny play based on the blog of local thinker and philanthropist Reed Sandridge. Eac…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 02:36PMMonday, July 23, 2012
The road to Fringe is paved with good intentions: Witness, for instance, “Tent of Dreams: An Occuplay,” mounted by Nu Sass Productions. A collaboratively generated piece written by Emily…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 12:16PMSunday, July 22, 2012
Oh what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! The 90-minute, six-actor “Hamlet” mounted by We Happy Few Productions practically invites theatergoers to join in Ophelia’s lament. For it is…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:43PMThe old-fashioned garments dangling from a laundry line, on the set of “Blanche: The Bittersweet Life of a Wild Prairie Dame,” appear to have been washed, and hung to dry, with loving ca…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 07:40PMFriday, July 20, 2012
It’s the kind of hoopla “Brides” magazine doesn’t warn you about. The room is seething with people in formal attire — dancing, eating wedding cake, cracking open the gift boxes tha…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 08:01PMTuesday, July 17, 2012
A little primping — a dab of radiance-renewing serum, an exfoliating scrub — will not suffice. With stiff dialogue, disjointed storytelling, awkward pauses, multiple wooden acting turns …
SOURCE: Washington Post at 11:13AMSunday, July 15, 2012
Let’s hear it for the corset, garment of personal liberation!
You can almost imagine that cheer resounding through the world depicted in “Flight of Fancy (A Steampunk Ballet).” This ch…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 10:54PMTuesday, July 10, 2012
Blood is thicker than water — but how does it stack up against the power of thought? That question is getting a satisfying theatrical workout at the Contemporary American Theater Festival,…
SOURCE: Washington Post at 05:02PM 
