The opening scenes of "Contractions," Mike Bartlett's humdinger of a corporate black comedy, will chill to the marrow anyone who's ever had to fill out a W-2. Emma, a well-groomed worker pla…
In an art form powered by illusion, dreaming turns out to be the easy part. Marvelous designs are laid out; visionary projects are greenlighted; exciting partnerships announced, to fanfare a…
NEW YORK " On a Wednesday in mid-November, Cheyenne Jackson woke up knowing he was one of the stars of a Broadway show. Twenty-four hours later, he knew he wasn't. Them's the breaks in show…
Can Washington more successfully cultivate its own gardens of playwrights and composers? It's not yet the case that this city, with its healthy appetite for theater, routinely looks to its o…
The condition known as laughing oneself silly is, it turns out, no medical myth. Doctors of comediology can observe, nay, can experience the syndrome themselves, right here, right now, thank…
"The cast came to us," musical-theater impresario Cameron Mackintosh is saying, as his Manhattan production office hums with pre-gala electricity. It's a few hours until the New York premier…
For childlike wonder, who else working in theater today can meet the enchanting standards of Natsu Onoda Power? Her latest performance piece, "A Trip to the Moon," ties together her loves of…
The top 10 productions, trends and events in the full and hectic life of Washington theater in 2012: Woolly Mammoth Theatre. The year's most ingenious theater piece. Playwright Anne Washbur…
Love is not merely risky business. It's a bona fide public menace " or seems so at least, when wielded like a nuclear device by the romantic terrorists of director John Malkovich's fascinati…
Like a team of theatrical rescue workers, three seasoned pros do everything in their power to aid Arena Stage's "Pullman Porter Blues." But though they provide welcome verve, their considera…
You can't get Melody Grove out of the bars these days, and nobody seems to mind. In fact, she's being actively encouraged to hop from pub to pub in city after city, dashing among the tables …
At its zaniest moments, "A Killing Game" is like that point at a kid's birthday blowout when the parents get out the silly string and let the sugar-saturated 7-year-olds run wild. The 7-year…
To miss Nova Y. Payton singing "(And I Am Telling You) I'm Not Going" would be like skipping Christmas. The gift is delivered midway through Signature Theatre's sizzling revival of "Dreamgir…
As socko finishes go, few comedies can match the one William Shakespeare came up with 400-plus years ago for "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The mirthfully tragic "Pyramus and Thisbe" skit " an…
The literary limbo of the benighted family of "Six Characters in Search of an Author" is capably handled in the revival of the Luigi Pirandello play by Arlington's WSC Avant Bard " even if, …
On the stage of a spacious auditorium at the nation's premier university for the deaf, a worker nails Styrofoam snow to the eaves of a mock-up of a 19th-century London streetscape, as actors…
NEW YORK " That most sensational of all stage tricks " the ordinary made momentous " is being practiced for your immersive pleasure eight times a week this fall at the Public Theater, where …
Evan, the impressionable high school kid played to poker-faced perfection by Brian Miskell in Annie Baker's terrifically still-watered "The Aliens," is the shy teenager in all of us, the one…
After listening to the luscious renditions of "I Could Have Danced All Night" and "On the Street Where You Live" in Arena Stage's often tunefully adept if dramatically inert revival of "My F…
If you're thinking of ordering the usual, the Bier Baron Tavern isn't the ideal destination these days. What's flowing instead in this Dupont Circle establishment is the heady lyricism of dr…
It's Folk Night all this month around the figurative fire at Camp Theater J, and all that's missing are the s'mores. Enlivened by the tunes of the great troubadour of America's disenfranchis…
Peeling the lid off a nation drowning in its own delusions is no small challenge. For confirmation, witness the difficulties playwright Mia Chung and her director Yury Urnov encounter in the…
NEW YORK " When the feisty little girl with the curly red hair fills her lungs to belt out the tune about the sun coming out tomorrow, the tingle one experiences starts at the bottom of the …
Of all the triumphs "War Horse" catalogues " of Allied forces in World War I; of a boy's fierce devotion; of an animal's fighting spirit " the most exhilarating is one of engineering. The ma…
Playwright Bryony Lavery offers an audience plenty to ponder in "Dirt," her antiseptic new stage contemplation of death and dying and other stuff. And the results are indeed plenty ponderous…