The frisky holiday theater season, prancing with musicals and piping with cheer, is sobering up this week with the intense Christian voyage "The Great Divorce." In this high-minded C.S. Lewi…
$12.50: that's what Washington's small non-Equity theaters will need to pay actors per day for rehearsal if they want their shows to be eligible for Helen Hayes Awards, along with meeting ne…
The person who steals the spotlight in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" at the Kennedy Center isn't Ace Young as Joseph or his wife, Diana DeGarmo, as the singing narrator. Bot…
To entertain you the Tony-winning revival of "Pippin" at the National Theatre jumps through hoops, swings from trapezes and catches bodies flopping down from the heights. It's a circus on pu…
You remember the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd change character with each stray hat that blows onto their heads? That's the idea behind Matthew R. Wilson's brisk and g…
"Come look at the freaks," goes the opening number of the star-crossed musical "Side Show.""No thanks," Broadway audiences say again and again.Lightning has struck down "Side Show" twice in …
New YorkBarry Levinson is settled into a booth at the diner. He's waiting on a burger and a diet Coke, and just like Shrevie, he's riffing about the hit records of 1959. ¶ "Listen to this…
Puppets meet untimely ends in "Famous Puppet Death Scenes," a 2005 show by Canada's Old Trout Puppet Company that begins Dec. 9 at Woolly Mammoth. The titles of the scenes " a "greatest hits…
A standing ovation came at an unexpected moment Tuesday night as Donny and Marie Osmond began their week-long stand at the National Theatre. A video montage during a low-key ballad chronicle…
"The Nutcracker" now at Bethesda's Round House Theatre is not the ballet, yet it's not quite a musical, and the jolly family Christmas party that opens the show is quickly shadowed by the ne…
Now is the winter we thank heaven for little girls, for January will bring audiences not one "Gigi," but two. The Kennedy Center's new stage version of the 1958 Lerner and Loewe movie musica…
The setup is classic: One man tries to be in two places at once; comedy ensues. Meet Matthew Wilson, who is directing "One Man, Two Guvnors" for 1st Stage while gearing up for his own solo s…
The time warp happens pretty fast in "Five Guys Named Moe" at Arena Stage: One minute a 1940s drunk named Nomax is moping about troubles with his gal, and the next he is getting advice from …
When last seen on Broadway in 2009, Disney's $15 million musical "The Little Mermaid" was quietly sinking under the waves after a run of less than two years. A planned major national tour of…
Tevye the milkman has been played by countless performers since "Fiddler on the Roof" began its long Broadway history 50 years ago, yet at Arena Stage Jonathan Hadary acts the part like it w…
How do you reconcile the jazzy 1940s-50s musical revue "Five Guys Named Moe" with a futuristic play about America's first gay president enduring a zombie apocalypse? "There is no reconciliat…
Tony Kushner is frequently cited as the country's leading working playwright, so it's more than slightly alarming to hear the "Angels in America" playwright say, "I don't want to lose my han…
Playwrights control their scripts. Screenwriters have a union and health insurance. Tony Kushner, playwright ("Angels in America") and screenwriter ("Lincoln") talks about these and other di…
Thekid in the anguished new drama "Not Enuf Lifetimes" is jumpy but lovable, a dreamy do-gooder and a hip-hop buff. Your heart immediately goes out to him as he buys his baffled working clas…
The "Julius Caesar" now playing at Folger Theatre is haunted, funereal and apparently eternal " a "Caesar" bubbling up from the pits of hell. Director Robert Richmond has set the play in a g…
Acting isn't a punch-the-clock job, yet performers are contractors, hired show by show. Cast members typically share dressing rooms, and most keep their "stations" in front of the mirror pre…
"I want to communicate," goes an early chorus of the musical "Visible Language," and that fundamental message is delivered in song, American Sign Language and even supertitles projected abov…
Two moments stand out from Friday's opening of "Our War," a new collection of short dramatic responses to the Civil War. One moment is a splendidly vivid tale of a rooster and a slave by Lyn…
NEW YORK " The sky over Central Park brightens Sheldon Harnick's living room, a spacious haven more than a dozen floors above Manhattan's streets. Misty, colorful paintings by Harnick's wife…
For some theater people, limelight is clearly a tonic. "Fiddler on the Roof" lyricist Sheldon Harnick still cuts a natty, lively figure " and at 90, he's still writing. Also flaunting stamin…