111 stories by "Roger Catlin"
It's the music and the dancing of The Nutcracker that have made it an annual tradition in cities across America for half a century. The new production of The Nutcracker at the Round House…
Anybody can put on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and many theater companies do, year in and year out. But hardly any pairs the Shakespearean romp with his lesser known The Two Noble Kinsman, th…
One of the best thing I did at my last newspaper was convincing them to run "Mutts," the splendid comic strip by Patrick McDonnell. A simple strip about dogs and cats and the people who love…
What could be better than an evening of the music of Louis Jourdan and his influential jumping jive that paved the road through jump blues to hard R&B and rock 'n' roll? That's what Clar…
When the Theater J production of Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures still hadn't begun a little after its posted st…
Families can be some crazy places. Within these primal institutions, where psychological blocks are built and broken down, everyday nagging and picking can build into some life-imploding pre…
You'll be rooting for the central character of Marc Goldsmith's Danny Boy in the Unexpected Stage Company production at the Randolph Road Theatre in Silver Spring. Not because he's a little …
The unusual alliance, in 1965, of boxer Muhammad Ali with Stepin Fetchit, the Depression-era comedian and stereotype, seemed so odd that it certainly deserves an imagined play chronicling th…
A nearly 100-year old play by Luigi Pirandello would seem to be a dusty old thing to attempt to stage. But dress it up in kicky 60s clothes on a nifty modernist set with vintage Italian pop …
There are some plays that are perfectly suited for Washington's historic Ford's Theatre and Alfred Uhry's "Driving Miss Daisy" is one of them. One imagines the spirit of Abraham Lincoln look…
Assembling a nice night of operatic arias for a cabaret production, Kathleen Cahill was struck by a commonality among the women in classic productions: They pretty much all ended up dead in …
The "MOTEL" sign flickers and sputters its message before showtime, forlorn and unforgiving as the Mojave desert landscape, as it awaits the production of Sam Shepard's Fool for Love to begi…
When a young woman named Abby returns home unexpectedly one afternoon after nobody showed for her yoga class, she finds her husband Zack home even more unexpectedly. That he was in the bedro…
A taste of Iceland is only a train ride away this summer as the new rock musical REVOLUTION IN THE ELBOW…, by Iceland's Ãvar Páll Jónsson, opened Off-Broadway at New York's Minett…
It seems fitting that LARP and theater would eventually meet. After all, LARP " or Live Action Role Playing, that fringe group of costumes, swords and adopted personalities " involves some o…
A taste of Iceland is only a train ride away this summer as the new rock musical REVOLUTION IN THE ELBOW OF RAGNAR AGNARSSON FURNITURE PAINTER, by Iceland's Ãvar Páll Jónsson, opene…
The current post-Fringe, pre-fall lull in D.C. theater is being filled admirably by Scena Theater, which is packing the Atlas Performing Arts Center with two Irish dramas, the first of which…
The role of Winnie in Samuel Beckett's "Happy Days" is supposed to be one of the prized roles for women of a certain age. "One of those parts," Dame Peggy Ashcroft once said, "actresses will…
You'd be hard pressed to find a better night at the theater than the terrific production of Private Lives at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Doffing the Bard in a season where they've previ…
As the audience files into Studio Theatre's "Grounded," Lucy Ellinson is already standing at attention, almost imperceptibly. In the Gate Theatre production directed by Christopher Haydon, s…
Politics is such a relentless, fulltime obsession in D.C., it may never occur to you to duck into a theater to take in more of it. Peter Sinn Nachtreib's The Totalitarians, which is closing …
After being told I couldn't even get in the door at the Spooky Action Theater until my cell phone was shut off, I thought: They are really cracking down on these electronic devices! Actually…
The American sex farce Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight begins in the throes of passion, when what would normally just be spontaneous and embarrassing bedroom barking escalates suddenl…
By the time Bloody Poetry, Â Howard Brenton's 1984 play of the romantic poets, begins in the current Taffety Punk production, Percy Byshhe Shelley is already en route to Switzerland with h…
In the modest black box theater where Taffety Punk Theatre Company is in residence in Capitol Hill, there is currently the kind of brash, invigorating literature lesson any teacher would cov…
