753 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
With its snappy-saucy take on Chicago, The Keegan Theatre shows it knows how to give an audience the ol’ razzle-dazzle. And Keegan has done the durable musical proud. In fact in Kee…
Breathe is a brilliantly conceived and beautifully executed gospel musical that celebrates black resilience even as it revisits the traumas endured by the black family in a nation built on s…
Despite its occultish name, The Tarot Reading is not a cabalistic rite for mystics. It is actually an ingenious theater game for hipster questers who are psyched to play along. To be sure, t…
I doubt the Eisenhower Theater was ever more queered than the night Taylor Mac came to town. The outrageously gifted and fabulously attired theater artist brought “a radical fairy real…
Wouldn’t it be fun to be a young urban radical and cohabit with other young revolutionaries"in a cheap walk-up apartment that you all share"eating fast food, having polyamorous sex, do…
There is a dramatic moment in Hold These Truths that comes as no surprise yet comes as a heart-stopping shock. We know going in that this moment is going to happen. We know that the U.S. Sup…
Mom Baby God"a solo show written and performed by Madeline Joey Rose about the right's attack on abortion rights"is as playful as it is powerful. The play centers on a fourteen-year-old girl…
When I had a chance ask Michael Urie some questions about his performance as Hamlet, I learned he can hold forth as insightfully as the character he plays. Well, maybe minus the verse and pl…
Can social justice happen without militancy? Can ideals of equality become real without resort to violence? These questions gnaw at the mind during Theater Alliance’s powerfully eloque…
Puppets, people, props, projections, and sci-fi pop up a lot on DC stages, but not often with the narrative verve, literary cred, and nonstop wit of The Lathe of Heaven. Adapted and directed…
There’s a lovely scene just before intermission that is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. It is 1833 in agricultural County Donegal Ireland, and two star-crossed lovers"Maire (Saman…
“Who here is a feminist?” asked the Ring Announcer (Amelia Hensley). As she signed, wearing a bright red pantsuit and standing on a thick padded mat as used for a contact-sport m…
When the 2018 Women’s Voices Theater Festival comes to a close and the hits to emerge from it are tallied, Danai Guria’s comedy Familiar will surely be on the shortlist. Guria…
There is something heart-stirring and inspiring about this new one-man musical. In between excerpts from glorious hymns and spirituals, the great African American educator and orator Booker …
The reason I asked to interview Katie Kleiger is that after I saw her in Sarah DeLappe’s The Wolves at Studio Theatre, I realized I had seen her on the same fourth-floor stage in Lu…
"What Mary Katheryn Nagle has given us on stage tonight is the history we don't learn," said renowned feminist author and organizer Gloria Steinem during one of the most buzzed-about talkbac…
A portrait of George Washington hangs in Ford’s Theater on the presidential box where Abraham Lincoln was shot. When you stop to think about it, this is an odd disconnect. Presumably f…
Kafka’s nightmare novel about a man named Joseph K"who is arrested, detained, and tried but never told what he has done wrong"would seem perfect for Synetic Theater’s magic touch…
A young Jewish American writer named Jonathan arrives by train in the Ukraine on a quest to find a woman named Augustine who helped his grandfather Safran escape the Nazis. He has only a fad…
Thornton Wilder’s allegorical paean to humanity’s survival “by the skin of our teeth” has itself become a marvel of endurance. First staged in 1942, when times were d…
Sex and guilt were linked in superstition before institutional Christianity came on the scene, but thanks to the medieval Catholic Church they got hooked up with theology too. It was in the …
Erika Rose's performance in Queens Girl in Africa is awesome to behold. She plays the playwright's teenage self, named Jackie, plus her parents, school friends, and others, with an incand…
When I saw the musical Amazing Grace I praised it to the skies. A blurb being used to promote the show is lifted from my review: "A gorgeous production of a glorious musical! Heart-stoppi…
“Let’s rethink sex” has suddenly become a thing. Well, not suddenly maybe. But it certainly has new pertinence in this era of full-frontal disclosure. Which made the th…
Dan Hoyle's extraordinary solo show The Real Americans is based on his travels through small-town America and the folks he met, many of them part of Trump's so-called base. When I reviewed t…
