Friday, November 13, 2020
February 8, 2020 I sat in GALA’s historic entertainment “palace” to review Nilo Cruz’ Exquisita Agonia. It was the last time (pre-Covid) I enjoyed live theater. Nine months later, Ma…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 03:54PMFriday, November 6, 2020
Election night 2020 IN Series opened a cantata-as-opera based on the Senate Judiciary hearings of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It was bold enough that Artistic Director Timothy Nelson …
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 01:36PMMonday, October 19, 2020
I click on the link and settle in for the new show, Joy!, delivered into my living room by Synetic Theater. A special surprise “Joy” box at my side ready to be opened. Check. Glass of …
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AMSaturday, September 26, 2020
Steam Punk as a style launches viewers into a futuristic universe while it casts a glance backwards nostalgically to a simpler, more elegant world. Miranda: A Steam Punk VR Experience create…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 11:42AMMonday, September 21, 2020
Ruth Bader Ginsburg well earned the sobriquet “Notorious.” Everything about her seemed to live in happy contradiction. She followed her mother’s “dueling” advice: always to be a …
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 10:06PMFriday, September 11, 2020
Learning about performance companies leaping into bold adventures and rediscovering the impulse of sharing their art in new creative ways has never been more welcome. Opera Lafayette, a comp…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:06PMMonday, July 20, 2020
We have come to the end of Synetic Theater’s series of short videos based on Giovanni’s classic “in-the-time-of-the-plague” entertainments. Like one of those imported Masterpiece The…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 07:54PMSaturday, July 18, 2020
Boccaccio’s world of The Decameron continues as cyber-theater for two more rounds of short videos by Synetic Theater’s company members and close associates. Imbedded in the program is o…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PMFriday, July 17, 2020
In trying to capture the times of our modern plague, the sum of the Synetic artists who have made these short performance works have shown us life as it has been reduced: clowns in cramped s…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 07:24PMTuesday, July 14, 2020
Day 5 brings us three new short works by Synetic Theater members as studies on life in the time of Covid. Kat Cárdenas-Cruz put a smile on my face with her short piece, “An Artist Struggl…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 02:03PMSunday, July 12, 2020
”And how shall we entertain ourselves?” the characters in Boccaccio’s 14th century story collection, The Decameron, keep asking, and each in turn tells a tale. In Day 3 of Synetic Thea…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 07:32AMFriday, July 10, 2020
In Ronald Harwood’s 20th-century play about the theater, The Dresser, the title character says of his friend who was in crisis due to depression, “What saved him was an offer of work.”…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 11:32AMWednesday, July 8, 2020
When society seems bound together in a single shared experience, that is often the time when a work of art resurfaces, offering itself up as metaphor and speaking directly to the times. Duri…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 05:54PMFriday, May 15, 2020
On May 13th, Opera America launched its first annual conference online, marking the organization’s Fiftieth Anniversary. Over 1200 people had signed in when I checked the count of attendee…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:36PMMonday, May 4, 2020
Strange times have given us just that: time. Specifically, all of us have time inside to experience performances on our home screens. Individual artists and companies are scrambling to mater…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 11:54AMTuesday, March 3, 2020
This first weekend in March brings together works from some extraordinary women working in exciting new directions today in the realm of ‘opera and beyond.’ In Series hosts a Women Com…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 08:03PMIt was inevitable. Don Giovanni would have to face the match of his life against the #MeToo movement. The problem is this production, not two years after the resplendent WNO production direc…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 09:18AMMonday, March 2, 2020
Opening night came on a Sunday afternoon for Samson and Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns. It’s an opera not seen in Washington for ages, and, headlined by the ravishing J’Nai Bridges, the…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 03:06PMFriday, February 28, 2020
Opera Lafayette has taken on a prodigiously ambitious task in tackling the “reawakening” of Ludwig van Beethoven’s single operatic masterpiece (Fidelio) by giving us the composer’s e…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 02:42PMFriday, February 14, 2020
I mostly love the works brought to DC by The Kennedy Center’s World Stages. I love the sub-genre of one-person shows. I also take a serious interest and have been involved in working with …
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 01:42PMMonday, February 10, 2020
Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz has come to Washington’s GALA Hispanic Theatre to direct his most recent play, and has unleashed from his prodigiously creative mind something l…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 03:32PMFriday, February 7, 2020
A stranger comes to town. He changes things up. He sheds a light on deep darkness. There are things the people don’t want to see but can’t look away. There is something of the shaman a…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:18PMMonday, January 27, 2020
Carey Perloff’s opening scene of the staged adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s shattering novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, moves with breathtaking beauty. Two women in one direction and a m…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 10:03PMTuesday, January 21, 2020
It was a rare pleasure to share the stage at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center less than a week ago with colleagues who are also in the business of reviewing the perfor…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PMFriday, January 17, 2020
For many of us in the audience of UrbanArias’ new production, Glory Denied, the Vietnam War is not distant history. Like the characters in this opera by Tom Cipullo, we carry that war in…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 04:42PMMonday, January 13, 2020
2020 marks the 8th year of Washington National Opera’s showcase of new compositional teams working in the most specialized art form of opera in a rollout of three twenty-minute operas. It…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PMMonday, January 6, 2020
In 1981, the once enfant terrible of stage and screen, Peter Brook, then seasoned into arguably the most formidable theatre director in the world, took the opera world by storm with his radi…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 01:36PMFriday, December 20, 2019
Everyone has a special memory of their first musical. Mine was My Fair Lady. It had opened in London in 1958 on Drury Lane after taking Broadway by storm, and, as a young child living there,…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 04:03PMTuesday, December 10, 2019
I Take Your hand in Mine is based on the intimate letters written between Anton Chekhov at the end of his life and his wife Olga Knipper. It has come to the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop in t…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PMMonday, December 9, 2019
When singer/musician/educator John Langstaff launched a seasonal celebration of early music in Boston back in 1971, comprised of song and general merriment that would bring community togethe…
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 11:33AMMonday, November 25, 2019
Make no mistake about it, I had this guy pegged in the first two minutes: a bumbling, bald-headed bungler trying to string together a show based on his own hoarding. Worse, an amateur! My …
Linked From DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PM 
