Taffety Punk's Hamlet, the First Quarto is the Bard's masterwork as you've never seen it before. At least probably. The Punks' new production grows from their experimental Bootleg series (wh…
How epic is the source material for The Fire and The Rain, the newest North American premiere of South Asian drama at Constellation Theater? Literally, the most epic. No hyperbole here, the …
Whenever I'm developing a new play and the playwright (or director or cast) gets stuck on figuring out a particular moment, I tell them this: a play is called a play for a reason. You're sup…
Last fall, when American Theatre Magazine published their annual list of "American Theatre's Top 10 Most-Produced Plays Of 2014-15," one play ruled them all: Christopher Durang's Vanya and S…
The drive to Frederick was long, but the destination was worth it. Not just because Frederick may be the most adorable town in driving distance of DC, but also because that town is home to M…
Would you go to prison for a play, to defend what that play said about the world? What would that play look like? You can see for yourself at MetroStage in Alexandria, with Athol Fugard̵…
What object best represents Man of La Mancha, the newly opened musical at Shakespeare Theater Company? Maybe a stylish and well-fitting pair of jeans with rivets on the seams. Perhaps a clas…
History's habit of repeating itself comes with a twist in Freedom's Song: Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, now playing at Ford's Theater. The play is essentially a museum piece made of a s…
Hip-hop is always hungry. Like the katamari of video game fame or the doubly insatiable hippos of the childhood tabletop game, hip-hop music and culture has absorbed (and remixed and made it…
Almost 30 years ago, Bob Fosse collapsed after rehearsals for a revival of Sweet Charity not two blocks from the National Theater, where I saw a piece of his legacy last night: the most rece…
Olney Theater's plan for their new rendition of Godspell, which opened this past weekend, was simple but effective: gather some of DC's best powerhouse vocal performers and pour them all int…
Arena Stage's newest world premiere by Ken Ludwig, Baskerville, is a rollicking comedy where 3 actors play 30+ characters in a jam-packed 2 hours of farcical fun. Heading to the back offices…
I sat down with playwright Madhuri Shekar at Signature Theatre, where her play In Love and Warcraft ran in the ARK until January 25th. We'd done the getting-to-know-you thing: She's from LA,…
I'm head-over-heels in love with this play. We all know the pain of age or overwork or of desperately loving someone with whom you could never share a kiss. It aches and it sucks. But all th…
When most audience members think of design in theater, their mind goes straight to the set. It's easy to do, since the set is often a production's most dominant and drastic change to a theat…
Ask any playwright and they'll tell you that the only thing harder than writing a play is getting someone to produce it. Playwrights often jump through some pretty humiliating hoops just to …
"I'm here to see the Trouts." Not a phrase I had uttered before. But in the near-empty seats of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's space, they were there. Trouts in the seats. Three member…
"Things fall apart," as Yeats said, and sometimes it seems like there is nothing we can do about it. The theater community watched a falling apart recently at Theater J with the abrupt firin…
When I first spied Theater Alliance’s 2014/2015 season, I was intrigued by their Christmas show: Black Nativity by Langston Hughes. Hughes was one of the most celebrated playwrights fr…
Sometimes, you get to see a play where the expectations are all laid out for you. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, now playing at the Kennedy Center, is that type of show, setti…
The first thing to know about Beauty and the Beast, Synetic's newest fairy tale offering in Crystal City, is not what the production is, but what it isn't. When buying your tickets, automate…
There's a certain pleasure to watching death-defying stunts, seeing frankly insane people take huge risks that put their physical well-being in danger. I often think of improv in the same wa…
Christmas isn't only the season of giving, receiving and familial travel, it's also the season of theatrical traditions. My family drives a number of hours to watch the complete 3 hour Hande…
When I first saw Theatre J's season announcement, I knew I wanted to talk with John Vreeke, director of Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scripture…
It's easy to become jaded in the theater. I see it all the time. Actors who have played the same part one too many times; critics who have seen the same productions of the same plays one hun…