178 stories by "Bob Ashby"
She is a compelling storyteller, living a life always on the cusp of change.
The rising star who plays Vivian tells how the musical has been revised since its Broadway run and how her character will be different from the movie.
And what songs they are! " classics on a par with anything in the American Songbook.
A laudable performance of the renowned playwright's autobiographical 'How I Learned What I Learned.'
Ken Levine's comedy has the virtue of not being a holiday warhorse.
The script gives an actor the opportunity for a sparkling display of comic virtuosity, and Jaclyn Young takes full advantage.
Emphasizing the play's fairy tale elements, Director Erin Nealer steered actors toward a wry, broadly comic style that regularly drew well-earned laughs.
The show's sights are fixed on the joy of living this day " joy that the production gives the audience abundantly.
A worthwhile engagement with the glories and complexities of the "dark operetta."
Good acting and taut direction in an enjoyably suspenseful evening of theater.
Performing solo, Madeline Sayet personifies her people's heritage of women as powerful carriers of their culture.
I spoke with Adam Turner, Artistic Director of the Virginia Opera, on Tuesday, September 15, about how a regional opera company weathers COVID and the shutdown of most live performance. Virg…
With live performances shut down since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists unemployed, and income streams disrupted, performing arts organizations continue to face the hardest of…
Theaters have gone dark during the pandemic, with little certainty about when or whether actors and audiences can again gather in the same space to tell and listen to stories that illuminate…
The Spitfire Grill was in Off-Broadway previews on 9/11. In part because its heartwarming, American roots/small-town spirited songs and characters struck a powerful emotional chord in the da…
Tales of wars, slaughters, betrayals, competing tribes and religions, and a few dominant women make the Book of Judges one of the more colorful segments of the Hebrew Bible. Camille Saint-Sa…
Adam Gwon's 2009 show Ordinary Days could serve as the prototypical Off-Broadway chamber musical: four young characters navigate the Big City in search of their lives, in 19 songs over 80 mi…
Spoiler alert: Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after. Of course, since Virginia Opera, like all opera companies of any size, prints a detailed synopsis in the program each patron…
For an evening of dry wit and sophisticated, subtle humor, make your way…Oh forget it. Just come to Constellation Theatre's The 39 Steps for a couple hours of cheesy lines, old situations,…
What would it have felt like, I've sometimes wondered, to listen, in sublime surroundings, to sounds conveying the deepest devotions of Christian belief, long before the "melancholy, long, w…
At Friendship Park, on the US-Mexico border just south of San Diego, from 10 am to 2 pm Saturdays and Sundays, 10 people at a time on the US side can see, and talk through a fence, with frie…
John Morogiello's new "based-on-a true-story" play Comedy of Venice, having its debut performance at Gaithersburg's Best Medicine Rep, centers on a feud between two 18th-century Venetian pla…
You will not this season see a more beautiful, emotionally wrenching portrayal of profound love than in Arena Stage's production of Ursula Rani Sarma's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Based on Kha…
The pipeline in the title of Dominique Morisseau's play is the "school-to-prison pipeline" affecting young African-American men. Fueled, as Studio Theatre's dramaturgical notes explain, by a…
Sean Grennan's Now and Then, receiving its East Coast premiere courtesy of Upcounty Theatre in Germantown, Maryland, deals in regret anticipated and recollected, and inquires about the possi…
