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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:08PMYou 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:39PM“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 …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:55PMPilgrims 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:56PMThere’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, …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:48PMThere’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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:17PMIf 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:53PMWhen 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:25PMWhen 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.…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 07:17PMVillainy 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. …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:04PMStorytelling 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:19PMHenry 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:30AMMore 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:15PMFirst, 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:52PMAlthough 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:56PMAnn 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:30PM“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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:49PMThere’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 …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:52PMWhenever 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:27PMSet 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:45AMShe 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:20AMImprov, 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�…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:21PMThere’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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:54AMWhen 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:00PMWhen 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…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:46PMWhat does a 200-year-old literary classic have to do with the chaos of the US Congress today? A lot, according to Jason Loewith, Olney Theatre Center’s Artistic Director, who has adapted F…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:19PMActors, by definition, play all sorts of roles. But for Jennifer L. Nelson—a theater veteran who’s been working on stage and off ever since she landed in DC at the age of 22—the multi-…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:19PMLaura Giannarelli is a woman of many roles. A founder of Washington Stage Guild, she’s been a fixture of the DC stage for almost four decades. She’s been the mother-in-law from hell in G…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:03PMIt took a little over 120 years. But—thanks to Theater J—Jacob Gordin’s wildly popular Yiddish drama, celebrated as The Jewish Queen Lear, has made it onto the English-language stage. …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:57PMFrom the moment she enters—decked out in widow’s weeds and descending a carpeted stairway—Nancy Robinette commands attention. That’s not unusual, since this actor—awarded the 2018 …
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:48PMNell Gwynn – as brash and bawdy as a play could be – has arrived on Capitol Hill. And what a triumph it is! The play, which had a successful run in London’s West End and won Br…
SOURCE: DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:08AM
