The moment Barack Obama locked up the Democratic nomination during the 2008 presidential campaign, British playwright Roy Williams " long acclaimed in the U.K. for his streetwise dramas of e…
When Michael Kahn took over the Shakespeare Theatre in the 1980s, he felt the best way to put the struggling troupe on the map was to open the doors for a day while Stacy Keach and the cast …
Musicals start with music. So why is music often the most disposable element of the show? Because musicals are expensive, sometimes corners get cut. (Flip side: Musicals are popular. They ma…
Can dragapella save a presidential campaign that suddenly seems to be hitting the skids, entertainment-wise? The Kinsey Sicks hope so. The Sicks are four men in red-white-and-blue drag, a "b…
Washington vetoed the idea of splitting the Helen Hayes Awards in two, creating separate categories for large and small theaters. In 2009, the Hayes Awards sent out surveys, created focus gr…
You've heard this before, right? Rock band begins to fray at the edges; the personalities clash, and the label dumps them; the drummer's dad is busted for torturing women in a dungeon . . . …
Foul weather, foul show Saturday night as a loyal band of followers crowded the small Warehouse Theatre for a final, one-night-only debauch by the dastardly, shuttering Cherry Red Production…
What does the Devil watch on TV? Reality shows, of course, chortling at the mayhem as foul-mouthed, amoral youngsters compete to be "interesting." "It's my fast food," Satan grins in "Someth…
It hasn't taken long for Allison Arkell Stockman and Tom Teasley to form one of the most distinctive theatrical partnerships in Washington. Stockman, artistic director of Constellation Theat…
When a drunk brings a stripper home and starts talking about the murderous impulses in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment," that can't be good, can it? That's the launching point of Zoe Mav…
Deb Margolin's "Imagining Madoff" has a firm identity as The Play That Angered Elie Wiesel: Last year the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, one of the many bilked by the herculean Ponzi…
The boys are back from the wars in Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," but they're being played by women in the Taffety Punk Theatre Company's amusing but unbalanced all-female productio…
It takes a really refined actor to get away with mischief onstage, and at the Studio Theatre Ted van Griethuysen is offering not one but two sly turns " both as the irascible British poet W.…
Commedia dell'arte, the antique Italian street comedy theater style, lends itself to improvisation, and actor Matthew R. Wilson had to think on his feet a couple weeks ago as his Faction of …
When Terri White was cast in the Encores! concert staging of "Finian's Rainbow" two years ago, and then in the Broadway transfer that followed, it was like coming in out of the cold.
Broadway baby? You bet. Linda Lavin's first Tony Award nomination came in 1970 for Neil Simon's "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," and she was in the running again last year " for the fifth time …
What we liked about "Stomp" - and there must be something, for the dance-a-little, whack-a-lot percussion show has been kicking around the world for 20 years - used to be its ferocious energ…
The one-man show "Tynan" at Studio Theatre is based on the great British theater critic Kenneth Tynan's diaries of his final decade - he died in 1980, only 53 years old. Listening to his pro…
Bernardine Mitchell is playing the early 20th-century jazz and blues singer Ethel Waters in "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," and both women deserve better treatment than they get in the show. Pl…
The old divisions are still alive in Horton Foote's "The Carpetbagger's Children," a tale spun by three grown sisters looking back over their fractious lives. There's North vs. South, of cou…