The glorious and painful truth about heroes is that they never die. Glorious because their moments of triumph and wonder can live on moment after moment, memory after memory, into the infini…
1. Most Emotionally Devastating Deaths by Inanimate Objects in A Play – Famous Puppet Death Scenes – Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company Feel free to kick yourself if you missed t…
When the leading gent in Round House's regional premiere of Stage Kiss goes on a mid-Act I rant, he declares that audiences only put up with theatrical smooching because kisses provide a sen…
The DC playwriters’ collective The Welders is taking a new direction with their latest offering, Our National Museum of the Unforeseen Tragedy. While their previous productions have be…
Motown the Musical has thundered into the National Theatre here in DC for a holiday run. The Detroit label that gave starts to artists like Michael Jackson and Marvin Gaye, graces the stage …
One of the most ambitious shows being put on in DC this winter is the oversized blockbuster musical West Side Story produced by Signature Theatre. Just how does Signature plan to fit this bi…
Perhaps you’ve noticed that the onstage language used to portray "real life situations" (think plays anywhere from Ibsen to Neil Simon to recent Tony winner All the Way) bears little r…
“Contemporary’ may not be the first word when one thinks of classic 1968 Broadway musical Oliver!, but that's exactly what Arena Stage has delivered in their update of the Dicken…
There's a question plaguing Hollywood today when it comes to wildly successful and praised new works: should we make a sequel and can it possibly be as good as the original? And while many b…
It would have been easy for Johnna Adams, whose World Builders at Forum Theatre focuses on two drug trials participants being treated for Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD), to write a play…
One of the hardest things about producing a Shakespeare play is making it feel up to date. Paraphrasing Jack Crew when contemplating playing Hamlet in Slings and Arrows, “Every time th…
I haven't seen a show so polarize an audience since Studio Theatre staged Annie Baker's The Aliens, where I witnessed multiple patrons demanding their money back at intermission and a patron…
One of the most surprising offerings in this DC theater season comes from Constellation Theatre, who are deviating from their usual epic fare with blockbuster Tony Award-winning show Avenue …
Farce gets a bad wrap as a genre. Pundits will call a sporting event or a political campaign a farce when they want to denigrate it, but in the theater, sometimes there's nothing more enjoya…
Good Kids, a play by Naomi Iizuka, will be read October 12, 2015 at The Kennedy Center as part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. A prolific playwright, many her recognitions is t…
There's a not-so-secret code in Theater for Young Audiences (TYA) productions. Whether you're a parent/guardian or just someone interested in theater, you might read the synopsis of a TYA pr…
Signature's remounted musical The Fix puts the "nasty" in dynasty by skewering the nepotism and celebrity culture oozing from contemporary politics. If you’re a patron of Signature The…
The first thing to know about I Thought The Earth Remembered Me is that it isn't a play, at least not in the traditional sense. The second thing to know is that this is the weird Fringe expe…
"Words don't matter, it's what they mean that counts," says (though I may be slightly paraphrasing) a worldly, French-speaking prostitute in a legal brothel in North Dakota. That isn't the s…
There’s an elephant in the room when Second City comes to DC -A Big Apple-shaped elephant. It says something when one of the best comedy troupes *outside of New York* comes to one of t…
Have you ever looked back on some of the games you played as an elementary school child and thought, "What a terrible game for children! Whose idea was it to teach us such an unthinkingly cr…
Impossible! is more than just a concept and title for Happenstance Theater's newest circus-oriented offering; it is the high bar of quality and aim that the ensemble and directors of this ch…
One curiosity of the theater – though it is being seen more and more in film as well – is a script that has been translated from another language. When we watch a play in transla…
There are dreams"and then there are Dreams. Small dreams spring from the random synaptic firing trigger by the stresses of the brain's day: dreams of teeth falling out or playing the piccolo…
One great thing about theater is that it is iterative, constantly being forged and reforged so it has immediate relevance to our social realities and problems. Major Barbara from Pallas Thea…