753 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
In real life, when we are spectators to two grown men facing off in dead-serious combat"right in front of us; with words, fists, lethal weapons, whatnot;Â unmediated by movies and such"our…
My four days in London last weekend offered time slots to see six plays"four evenings and two matinees. My strategy was to seek intriguing, fresh writing in a mix of West End, Off West End, …
Live theater is not where we turn to learn the news in real time. We have TV and Twitter and plenty other frenzied feeds for that. But live theater may be the most potent and important form …
S. Ann Johnson's Double X"an exquisitely crafted choreopoem exploring the multicultural distinctions and connections among seven women"had its DC debut Saturday after appearances in Baltimor…
Musical theater and the country could use a good renegade rock musical inspired by the Occupy Movement. The demonstrations that spread across America spurred by Occupy Wall Street shared a k…
Fans of Cirque du Soleil know to expect wonder, beauty, and thrills, and Cirque doesn't disappoint. It's a brilliantly executed brand that has become a global phenomenon (21 different produc…
I sure laughed a lot at the show I saw the other night at Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Gut-busting funny, it was. And I'd highly recommend you catch it…except it was made up on the spot, never …
I first saw Dael Orlandersmith's Yellowman at the Manhattan Theater Club in 2002, with Orlandersmith herself in the role of the dark-skinned Alma and Howard W. Overshown as the light-ski…
So this strange thing happened. I was sitting at a table in a church basement that happened to be on the fourth floor of The Studio Theatre, and I was waiting to see a show called Hand to Go…
As the local go-to theater company for carrying on the Grand Guignol tradition, Molotov Theatre Group mounts some of the most interesting combos of style and substance in town. There are a f…
I have admired Shirley Serotsky's work as a director on such shows as Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy at Theater J in 2014 and Rapture, Blister, Burn at Round House Theatre in 2015. Shirley also serv…
I wish that recent events had not made this powerful theater experience so necessary. I wish that Capital Fringe would have come along again and this production would have warranted theaterg…
The young actor and rapper Darius McCall fell so much in love with the role of Romeo that he longed to bring the character to life, by himself, alone on stage with but Shakespeare’s wo…
Anna Snapp gives a robust, witty, and protean performance in this genuinely candid and insightful solo theater piece. Self-authored, and based on her own life, I Found That the Sun Will Rise…
The future of the Capital Fringe Festival has been uncertain since its brilliant and brave inception in 2006, but back in July 2013 its fate was especially iffy. The festival's fabulously fu…
Studio Theatre's fourth floor has been turned into an amazing facsimile of a Lutheran church basement, complete with inspirational posters on the walls and seating at folding tables as if fo…
You know you've just seen a play that hits a nerve about the distress of parents who have a troublesome, troubled son (whom they love but don't know how to cope with) when you're reading…
Post-Play Palaver is an occasional series of conversations between DCMetroTheater Arts writers who saw the same performance, got really into talking about it, and decided to continue their e…
The very transportable set for this touring production consists of a small enclosure of flimsy, fragile fabric cubes painted to look like stone blocks but really as insubstantial as little l…
There's an ancient child-custody legend about two women who claim to be the mother of the same infant. In the well-known Hebrew Bible version, their dispute is resolved when King Solomon ord…
I have admired Shirley Serotsky's work as a director on such shows as Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy at Theater J in 2014 and Rapture, Blister, Burn at Round House Theatre in 2015. Shirley also serv…
No-No Boy is an extraordinary and essential play. It's about what happened to innocent people when this country demonized and incarcerated Japanese Americans during World War II. To witn…
After filming not a few Rotten Tomatoes targets and appearing in too many tabloid headlines, the real Ben Affleck has cleaned up and redeemed himself in the public stargaze, both professiona…
Whatever your mental picture of heaven, the funny and beautifully moving production of Bekah Brunstetter's Going to a Place Where You Already Are just opened at Theater Alliance may al…
Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon wears irony on its sleeve with the same effrontery that three of its characters wear red, white, and black greasepaint to dissemble "race." Just opened a…
