Like most young dramatists, Jason Gray Platt is a struggling one who holds down a day job to nourish his hopes of watching his work come alive at night. Having obtained a degree from Columbi…
The more the star of "Arias With a Twist" exposes his outrageousness, the more he manages to class up the joint. The joint in question is Woolly Mammoth Theatre, where Joey Arias straps on a…
As if Washington's lively bar scene were not already packed with drama, it is soon going to be the setting for an actual one. The Shakespeare Theatre Company, staging a play for the first ti…
Nationals Park isn't the only spot on the Washington waterfront that gives you a taste of the pros these days. Just around the point at Arena Stage, the player to watch is Helen Carey, who w…
NEW YORK"Ricky Martin does a pretty good job of playing Ricky Martin throughout the plodding pageantry of "Evita," the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that opened in lavish revival Thu…
About two hours into Shakespeare Theatre Company's 3-hour, 45-minute production of "Strange Interlude," the tragic condition of Eugene O'Neill's troubled, meddlesome heroine, Nina Leeds, com…
Dudgeon achieves a sexy new high in the scenery-quaking workouts of Synetic Theater's adaptation of "The Taming of the Shrew." The bare-midriffed tantrums of the ageless Irina Tsikurishvili …
It's that gusty time of year again, when the skies open up over Broadway and out of the clouds come the April showers of new productions, all making landfall just under the Tony Awards deadl…
BALTIMORE " For an artist from another land, Kwame Kwei-Armah is sure making himself comfortable here quickly. Just a few short months after arriving from London and taking over as artistic …
BALTIMORE " The Wolf in Grandmother's bed doesn't seem quite so big and bad anymore. No, like other malicious aspects of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fractured fairy-tale musical, "In…
When a new musical is engaged in the complicated process of trying to find its voice, an audience has to be willing to listen to some misplaced notes, to hear it speak and sing in a sometime…
The apologetic phone call from Mike Daisey was a painful one, says Woolly Mammoth Theatre's artistic director, Howard Shalwitz. It came the day before the shattering news was made public, ne…
At the cozy end of a summer day's lark " a long day's lark at that " a contented dad sits in his easy chair, across from a beaming mom, and reflects on the many blessings that have been best…
A few short weeks ago, in a Brooklyn restaurant, I sat down to a long lunch with Mike Daisey, to talk about the enormous success of "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" and his plans to…
Was ever a charmer of fabric and wire more aptly named than Basil Twist? This master twister of stuff you find in hobby drawers and hardware stores into winsome shapes and figures seems to h…
At a pivotal moment, "Gypsies" " a play from Hungary visiting as an offshoot of the Kennedy Center's music-centered "Budapest, Prague and Vienna" festival " turns into Central Europe's answ…
NEW YORK " One must pay attention to a man even as inattentive as the loutishly bewildered Willy Loman, whom Philip Seymour Hoffman portrays so effectively in director Mike Nichols's steel-g…
Even those who can only stumble through "The Star-Spangled Banner" are bound to find plenty of tuneful enjoyment in Ford's Theatre's dandy new revival of "1776," a musical that dares to sugg…
Well, well, hello, oldie! This is the time of year when the region's subscription theaters lay down their cards, revealing what they've got in their hands for the new season, which begins ar…
Oh, no, no. Not Eugene O'Neill. Isn't he the tortured one who wrote all those long, tortured plays about all those tortured people from tortured families that resembled his own tortured clan…
When the blows start flying in Studio Theatre's "Sucker Punch," it's the audience that sees stars. In this case, that means the powerhouse visages of Emmanuel Brown and, even more electrifyi…
NEW YORK"The eagerly buzzed-about stage revival of "Carrie" is still not ready for prom time. A storied Broadway flop based on the Stephen King novel of the same title, the original show ope…
Not until the odd couple in knit caps and bewildered looks wander wide-eyed into "The Language Archive" does a sense of attenuation escape Julia Cho's play, about the ramifications of mixed …
One afternoon, as I waited for the end of an intermission in one of Washington's swankiest theaters, my daydreaming was interrupted by an usher. "Excuse me sir," she said politely. "But we h…
While Shakespeare held forth on the seven ages of man, Carmen C. Wong zeroes in on the growth stages of womankind in "Into the Dollhouse," her interactive contemplation of what gets filtered…