754 stories by "John Stoltenberg"
Signature Theatre's new production of The Threepenny Opera"directed and choreographed with unerring cunning by James Gardiner"is cringe-inducing, snarky, impudent, and jarring. Everything it…
Shooting sprees have become commonplace in our media consumption. Nowadays breaking news of yet another gunman and his multiple victims (the shooters are always male) more numbs than shocks.…
Jarman (all this maddening beauty)-A Report on a work in progress For as long as there have been movies, theater artists have tried to integrate film with live performance. Something about c…
Up on the fourth floor of The Studio Theatre is a great big black box of a performance space, which isn't actually black because its walls are cinder block, rather like an institutional encl…
There's not a long list of great actors who, through their indelible bravura depiction of a great historical figure in a solo performance, warrant substituting the word "is" for "as," in bil…
The real President Jimmy Carter attended the premiere of Camp David"the engrossing new play by Lawrence Wright in which he is the central character"and offered up this mini-review of it in a…
Since mid-January an intrepid troupe of musical-theater students has been rehearsing the sweet and soulful show Violet at The Theatre Lab School of the Dramatic Arts under the ab…
Watching Arguendo"an actual Supreme Court transcript staged cheekily for chuckles by Elevator Repair Service, the New York"based troupe specializing in literary vérité"is like watching …
If/Then, the musical with the biggest heart you can imagine, is now back home in the Big Apple, and just like its main character, Elizabeth (the incomparable Idina Menzel), it is starting ov…
As many who follow local theater news know, Theater J's production of The Admission has been preceded by an offstage drama"a who's-right/who's-wrong argument, a what-really-happened/wh…
Quiara AlegrÃa Hudes’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Water by the Spoonful is set in 2009 and takes place mainly in Philadelphia but also travels to San Diego, Japan, and Puerto Ri…
Molotov Theatre Group has an uncanny knack for converting its tiny black-box nook into an auditorium-scale operating theater for surgical dissection of the dark side of human nature. With it…
Among the exhilarating pleasures of seeing American Idiot now on tour at the National Theatre is experiencing this angsty, amped-up ode to antiestablishment disaffection performed …
It takes a wagonload of courage to take on Brecht these days. His "alienation effect" esthetic challenges every theatrical convention that makes a show a contemporary commercial success. He …
If there was an open casting call for the role of you, who should get the part and who shouldn't? Must the actor be descended from a gene pool that arose in the same area on the globe …
Orlando, WSC Avant Bard's upcoming production, is based on Virginia Woolf's classic 1928 novel in which Woolf based the character Orlando on the woman she was madly in love with. In both the…
If you're willing to let your inner child stay up after bedtime and go out and play at The Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater instead, you're in for an evening of theatrical wonderment and …
The evening began enchantingly. The audience was seated on four sides of a square playing area lit by stage lighting, so we could look across and see one another's faces in that wonderful ex…
I had not been to kid's theater since I was a kid. As an inveterate theater buff, I was dimly aware there was much highly praised professional children's theater in the DC Metro area"but I w…
Urinetown: The Musical holds a special place in my theatergoing memory. I first saw it in New York City days after the September 11, 2001, attacks because then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani told me…
History hit an astounding "rewind" and "refresh" button last night at The National Theatre. An abundantly assorted audience of Washingtonians rose as one to applaud an iconic work of mus…
Avid and discerning theatergoers seeking a fresh take on a beloved classic will not find a more rewarding gift this time of year than Our Suburb, brilliantly directed by Judith Ivey, which j…
Washington Improv Theater has been tickling DC audiences for 15 years. When I discovered the madcap company a while ago, I got hooked on the spot. Hooked as in addicted. Feeling the need for…
"Audience integration" is a buzzword that has been flying around awhile but only recently landed in my brain. In live theater, it means going beyond removing the fourth wall; it means erasin…
It is one thing to amble through a modern art gallery and appreciate an innovative multimedia installation"some videos and audio here, some projections and lighting effects there, perhaps so…
