Thursday, February 11, 2021
When I interviewed Ken Ludwig about his latest play, Dear Jack, Dear Louise, which opened at Arena Stage more than a year ago, I was curious about his parents—the Jack and Louise of the ti…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:58PMThursday, September 24, 2020
Screens will be lighting up all over Metro DC as theater lovers, supporters, and luminaries gather online for the 2020 Helen Hayes Awards Friday, September 25. The red carpet unrolls at 6 pm…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:21PMWednesday, July 29, 2020
When COVID-19 first struck last winter, most of us in the theater world—audiences as well as those on or off stage—thought the crisis would end in a couple of weeks. No such luck. Theate…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:56PMSunday, May 24, 2020
When Joy Zinoman—the doyenne of DC theater and founder of Studio Acting Conservatory—describes the training center’s new home as a “sacred place,” she’s not exaggerating. …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:00PMSaturday, March 7, 2020
When Jordan Friend, the highly inventive founder of 4615 Theatre Company, invited me to attend a rehearsal of Museum 2040 a few weeks ago, I jumped at the opportunity. The show, billed as an…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:45AMWednesday, February 26, 2020
“I’ve never laughed so hard in rehearsal,” said Nick Olcott, describing some of the antics performed by a tiny but talented cast — four actors in 48 roles — in the wickedly funny s…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:41PMSunday, February 9, 2020
When Laura C. Harris bursts onto the stage in Silent Sky at Ford’s Theatre, she is Henrietta Leavitt—hoop skirt and all—fresh out of college, brimming with confidence, and determined t…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:08PMTuesday, February 4, 2020
You don’t have to read Ulysses—or, for that matter, know anything about James Joyce, its author, or Leopold Bloom, its hapless hero—to love Bloomsday. The play, a gentle romance now bl…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:39PMThursday, January 30, 2020
“Read the book. But see the play first!” That’s what Hend Ayoub—the actor who plays Mariam, the empowered first wife of A Thousand Splendid Suns—told me about the show, now in its …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:55PMWednesday, January 22, 2020
Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World—the award-winning play now enjoying its DC debut at Mosaic Theater—is as delicious a romp as any that’s come along in a while. Billed as a roma…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:56PMThursday, December 26, 2019
There’s no doubt about it. Eureka Day is a very funny play. The show, now having its DC debut at Mosaic Theater, features five perfectly-attuned actors, a director who understands comedy, …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:48PMWednesday, December 18, 2019
There’s a lovely new play at Arena Stage, but you’ll have to rush if you want to see it. That’s because the play—Ken Ludwig’s Dear Jack, Dear Louise—will be off and running befor…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:17PMWednesday, December 11, 2019
If the notion of compressing 900 years of Irish mythology into a single two-hour show sounds like a lot to take on, that’s because it is. In fact, tackling the entire pantheon of Irish leg…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:53PMSunday, December 8, 2019
When Fiddler on the Roof opens at the National Theatre next week, the village of Anatevka—the fictional setting for one of the most successful Broadway musicals in history—will not be th…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:25PMWednesday, November 20, 2019
When Susan Rome bats her eyelashes—as she often does in Edward Albee’s Occupant, now at Theater J—she becomes Louise Nevelson, the iconic sculptor whose life and work were inseparable.…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:17PMThursday, November 7, 2019
Villainy takes many forms. And Ian Merrill Peakes – now plotting revenge against a gifted rival in the Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s production of Amadeus – has played more than a few. …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:04PMThursday, October 31, 2019
Storytelling is a gift. And Conor McPherson—the Irish playwright, screenwriter and long-time ‘bad boy’ of the British stage–is one of the most gifted tale-tellers ever known. His Por…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:19PMThursday, September 19, 2019
Henry IV Part I, which opened at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre last week, is superb. (Click here for DCMTA’s review.) This production, starring Ed Gero, is equal to any I’ve seen. In fa…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:30AMTuesday, September 10, 2019
More than 50 seniors crowded into a storytelling circle inside one of the Kennedy Center’s new REACH buildings on Monday, and I, as a card-carrying member of the reduced-fare generation, s…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:15PMThursday, September 5, 2019
First, the bad news. Enron, the farcical, scary and all-but-unbelievable romp through the biggest fraud in corporate history, has closed. The good news is that there’s still time—four mo…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:52PMFriday, August 30, 2019
Although it sounds serious on the surface, Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, is one of the funniest plays ever to grace a DC stage. That’s the opinion of my colle…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:56PMWednesday, July 24, 2019
Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas, and the first woman in that state to be elected in her own right would be howling with glee if she could see the pandemonium unleashed in government…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:30PMMonday, July 22, 2019
“Heaven is so boring.” That’s the complaint of a modern-day version of Dante Alighieri in Inferno the Musical, a look at the vagaries of life and love and the inevitability of fate. Wr…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:49PMFriday, July 19, 2019
There’s plenty of beef in Carolann Valentino’s one-woman musical, If These Balls Could Talk, about her life as a young actress from Texas working at a steakhouse in New York. This was …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:52PMTuesday, July 16, 2019
Whenever Erick Acuña is asked to play Peruvian music, he launches into a burst of rock. Why not, he wonders, since rock is his country’s favorite sound. But rock is not what his hosts ex…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:27PMMonday, July 15, 2019
Set in a blighted corner of Wales, Iphigenia in Splott is a breathtaking one-woman show, imported from the UK and written by Gary Owen, a Welsh playwright and winner of the Meyer-Whitworth A…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:45AMSaturday, July 13, 2019
She Sings Light, written by Claudia Rosales-Waters and directed by Josh Sticklin, is one of four ‘curated’ shows in the 2019 Capital Fringe Festival. That means that this highly symbolic…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:20AMThursday, July 11, 2019
Improv, as any actor knows, is harder than it looks. And dramatic improv—in which actors invent their roles as they go, expanding on a basic situation in ways that are both comic and sad…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:21PMWednesday, June 26, 2019
There’s not much to laugh at in politics today. Nor is it easy to make fun of diversity, gender, Putin, or Pepsi. But that doesn’t prevent the team of talented comedians at Second City…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:54AMThursday, June 20, 2019
When the actor playing Blackbeard first appears on stage at the Signature Theatre in the new musical bearing his name, smoke literally curls out of his matted black hair. It’s a terrifying…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:00PMTuesday, May 28, 2019
When Farrell Parker steps out onto the black box stage at The Writer’s Center in Flying V’s version of We’re Gonna Die, something explodes. Light and sound—literally—erupt. And whi…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:46PM 
