1,519 stories by "Peter Marks"
When it comes to fruit from a poisoned tree, the biliously funny "Appropriate" displays it by the bushel. The young playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins dreams up a nasty extended family that h…
Don't think of the time you spend on the tarmac anymore as the takeoff. No, from now on you're going to have to call it the opening number. At least that's how it might feel on Virgin Americ…
The producers of a newly announced revival of "Gigi" " a stage musical adapted from the Academy Award-winning movie " are hoping that Washington audiences remember it well. The launch of thi…
Idina Menzel knows a thing or two about charmed lives. She is, after all, the original Elphaba, the green-skinned witch of "Wicked," the megahit Broadway musical that earned her a Tony Award…
By the numbers " and that's the only way, really, to understand the rationale for "Sister Act," the musical " the lay of the entertainment land would be welcoming to a stage version of the 1…
So devoted to her delusion of suburban bliss is Carly, the toned Southern belle of "Pride in the Falls of Autrey Mill," that she's blinded to all of the obvious cracks in the subdivision's f…
"Shut . . . the . . . door!" Erin Weaver's seething Juliet exclaims through clenched jaw, as she and Eric Hissom's dazed Friar Lawrence hunker down to absorb the …
NEW YORK " They should have renamed it, "A Lot of Time to Kill." The producers stuck instead with the title it bore at Arena Stage, "A Time to Kill," the title it shares with the best-sellin…
Melissa James Gibson always seems to be writing about what's not been happening to her characters. In"[sic]", her subjects were young New York dilettantes, filling their undistinguished days…
Adding to its burgeoning reputation as an importer of high-end artistic wares, Shakespeare Theatre Company will introduce Washington audiences in March to yet another innovative British thea…
When you're setting a play in a country you've never visited, it's certainly a good idea to run the piece by people with more intimate knowledge of the place. This was the task dramatist Cha…
If you're any kind of fan of horror movies, then you've probably taken in a splatter film or two. But a splatter PLAY? Leave it to the fiendish folks at Synetic Theater to find a way to thri…
Boy, when best friends gather in "Rancho Mirage" " the name of both the new play and the deceptively idyllic subdivision of playwright Steven Dietz's imagination " bottles of wine aren't the…
Although "Red Speedo" concerns itself with events that occur in the water, the dramatic element most apparent on this evening at Studio Theatre is hot air. Lucas Hnath's topical new play, re…
The most vivacious moments of the new "Measure for Measure" at the Shakespeare Theatre Company " on the whole, an evening on the dry side " aren't strictly Shakespearean. They're Munbian. As…
The part has bravura written all over it: An octogenarian iconoclast is so enraged at her children's efforts to send her to an old-age home that she barricades herself in her Brooklyn browns…
In the daily wrestling match with myself over how I feel about the piece of theater I'm seeing, the amount of money that's been spent to create it rarely if ever enters my consciousness. I d…
NEW YORK " The rapturous reception here for Anne Washburn's dazzling "Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play" is not only further validation of the ingenuity of an exciting young dramatist. It also…
Meet the nightmare neighbors. Their names are Sharon and Kenny, and they've just moved into the unkempt tract house next door. Recent graduates of Rehab U., they seem friendly enough, even i…
In its march to the big time, "The Velocity of Autumn" was forced to decelerate. An announcement of Eric Coble's drama coming to Broadway last spring had been widely publicized, along with t…
"Agnes Under the Big Top" is doughnut theater: a mushy thing with a hole in the middle. Aditi Brennan Kapil's underdeveloped drama, tying together the stories of immigrants in America in a …
I say unto you that henceforward, the program of every new production of "Torch Song Trilogy" " Harvey Fierstein's groundbreaking comedy of gay American aspiration " should contain the words…
On "Next to Normal's" official opening night at Arena Stage in late 2008, the show's creators, Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, handed the musical's producer, David Stone, something he will always…
A big-time dancer will step into the ballet slippers in "Little Dancer," the musical inspired by a famous Edgar Degas subject that will have its world premiere at the Kennedy Center a year f…
Let's deal right at the top with the urgent transportation question of the day: Yes, "Miss Saigon" works without the helicopter. Some of you will recall that the technical coup in the long-r…
