293 stories by "Jayne Blanchard"
Floyd and Ted's Excellent Adventure with the Bard  Actors Floyd King and Ted van Griethuysen are mad about the Bard. They have nothing but good things to say about Shakespeare and not…
Colin Firth is"and will always be"Mr. Darcy. But one does have to move beyond the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, albeit reluctantly. Michael Brusasco as Mr. Darcy and Kate C…
"Here. Feel these. I don't know how women do it," says Robert Aubry Davis, offering me a squeeze of his size 54 EEE breasts"each one roughly the pendulous shape and heft of a Hubbard squash,…
No worries about writer's block or evoking the muse for Washington author Ken Ludwig. In addition to penning 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, a world premiere holiday children's show for Ad…
Like the character Amanda Prynne's (Deborah Hazlett) heart, Private Lives is jagged with sophistication. Noel Coward's oft-produced 1930 play"which he starred in with his great friend and co…
A son’s bedtime wish was the creative spark for Stay A bottle of wine can lead to many things, but for playwright Heather McDonald and choreographer Susan Shields, it led to an arti…
Turning 30. A time to look back, take stock, grow up. Or reinvent a theater. When Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company hit the big 3-0 two years ago, artistic director Howard Shalwitz viewed the o…
You'd kill for those shoes. And those legs. That's your initial impression of the touring production of the Tony Award winning 2010 Broadway revival of La Cage Aux Folles, which lands in Bal…
Happenstance Theater has found a winsome way to keep Halloween in our hearts all year long"the chills, the thrills, the frights, the things that go bump in the night. The troupe's Cabaret Ma…
Giddy-up Armageddon! could be the rallying cry for evangelical misfit Will (Michael Russotto), the sad-sack hero of Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise, a divinely inspired heartland comed…
Thanks for the mammaries. Breast wishes. Tits a Wonderful Life. You can cry over breast cancer"or you can laugh. Composer, lyricist and playwright Joan Cushing does both"as well as pens some…
Cancer is the great equalizer. You can be smart, dim-witted, a marshmallow or a field marshal"its ruthless, endlessly propagating cells ravage everyone the same. This is a tough lesson for P…
Actor Emery Battis passed away September 20th at the age of 96. Like many theatergoers, I grew up watching him onstage and came to think of him as a production's good luck charm.
Now that the western sun has set on Arena Stage's Oklahoma!, Washington is in danger of being bereft of glorious singing voices and exemplary choral work. That void will be filled by Ford Th…
Baltimore has many advantages over its sister city to the South"better food, nicer people, filmmaker John Waters, and the citizenry got to see Alice Childress' funny, furious come-to-Jesus-t…
A Raisin in the Sun was groundbreaking in 1959 and is heartbreaking in 2011. Lorraine Hansberry's play about a working class black family in Chicago chasing middle class dreams is vivid, vit…
Monkey butt jokes, Bollywood-style dance sequences, parables about how to be the ideal husband and wife, delectable world music and actors who make virtue and duty seem kinda sexy intermingl…
After a particularly unfortunate week, what a pleasure it was to wallow in the misery of others. Especially when that misery was as lustrous as that portrayed by the Sydney Theatre Company i…
Sometimes, you are in one of those Peggy Lee "Is That All There Is?" states of mind and then you see a play that reminds you why you still go to the theater. John Ottavino as Byron and Ander…
You gotta wonder what women did to David Mamet to deserve such misogynist treatment in the play Oleanna and now with Race. Playwright Edward Albee has addressed his thorny relationship with …
How does an enviably perfect, fortunate family cope with senseless tragedy? The Nash clan takes a rather curious route " song. Barrington Walters, Jr. as Eli (Photo: Ron Blunt) In Tra…
There's nothing new under the sun, or in fact, under the Hollywood sign. The movie biz's penchant for endlessly recycling itself is parodied in the Reduced Shakespeare Company's show Complet…
It's 1605 and Spain needs a noble knight. The retired country squire, Don Quixote, stuffed to the gills with chivalric novels, decides he is the man to bring gentility back. Donning a helmet…
Talk about destiny. Tell your kid his penis is called "bootycandy" and you are not setting him  up for a career as, say, a civil engineer. Something a tad more dramatic and outlandish is …
Is there anything more delicious than Harold Pinter done well? When the show's funny and weird and a polite sense of dread hangs over everything like a sinister odor? The Shakespeare Theatre…
