394 stories by "Susan Galbraith"
Sunday night’s opening at MetroStage was a fanfare affair. Not only did the press come out in full force (not always easy to get in the crowded local theater market,) being in the audi…
Snow could not deter the faithful from The John F. Kennedy Center last weekend where we saw an extraordinary commitment of artists and audience members gather as part of this year’s Am…
Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative, now in its seventh season, annually holds a mini-festival and commissions a composer-librettist team to create an hour-long opera and r…
This is not a review. Rather, it's a memory of an event that caused a kind of metastasized growth inside and, until now, kept me from ever being able to attend a performance of the Broad…
If you like your Christmas holiday fare free of treacle then this is the show for you. No annoyingly twee children shouting out carols in bad English accents and no sticky sugar plums to get…
With the help of one "ordinary" angel with back-pack wings and a gaggle of colorful, singing animals, a story of complete enchantment unfolded, vying for the number one spot on the extensive…
Librettist Mark Campbell and I last spoke when he was mentoring young librettists in a "supportive role" for Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative. Now Campbell is front …
Director Aaron Posner has assembled some of the most splendid, certainly several of them among the most beloved actors who tread the local boards. Indeed, Folger Theatre has done further val…
Mozart's delightful Marriage of Figaro has been a perennial favorite, not only produced frequently by opera companies, but its material has been poured over, parsed, and mastered as part of …
What to call the rare and precious experience of sitting in the darkness of a theatre where something has broken out of its own self and taken wing? Â Some say a magical work of art is one…
–Â How does a company, becoming known for staging the classics, navigate what may be the trickiest of all comedies, Venus in Fur? And what is the connection between David Ives’…
Cheek by Jowl, London and The Pushkin Theatre, Moscow have brought to Washington a great Measure for Measure. The experience spoke straight to the heart of what we have been living in the na…
The season's opening night at Washington National Opera is always filled with excitement, but there were several elements that caused the atmosphere around Saturday evening's La traviata to …
Washington National Opera, generously sponsored by Mars, Inc, has created what may be Washington's most terrific recent tradition " "Opera in the Outfield." There were 10,000 people reported…
What an opening for an opera! After a low tremolo on the bass and some nice string section writing as violins, viola, and cello join in, suddenly on stage appears a bearded, para-military du…
Svanda Theatre has journeyed to Washington from Prague in a residency that includes 'Four Plays from Prague' in repertory " works that confront us with difficult periods of history when huma…
No one can put music and lyrics together the way Stephen Sondheim has done " astonishingly " for decades, since the mid-1950's. In my interview with Matthew Gardiner, who is directing a …
From Kurt Boehm's direction and nuanced yet sure performances of the leads to Michael Innocenti’s evocative gorgeous lighting and Patrick Lord’s projections, Keegan Theatre's The…
Three sleek suburban women stay active by running around their neighborhood and spying on their somewhat suspicious neighbor. Choreographer and director Jane Franklin has devised the smart m…
In settling in to The Truth, I was reminded of the show within the show of A Midsummer Night's Dream and its PR buzz of being of "very tragical mirth." How else could you package a tale of f…
With Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?, UrbanArias has given us an operatic gem, and the talents assembled for the production have encased this most entertaining work in pure gold. Wh…
For parents pondering how they might introduce their children to opera and which might be most appropriate, look no further than The Cunning Little Vixen. This curious and fanciful little op…
With a big nod to the continued centennial celebration of "Lennie" (Leonard Bernstein) that this opening of Glimmerglass 2018 season represents, one cannot overestimate the importance of Jer…
From the theater that prodded, poked, and provoked for nigh on forty years rose the unlikeliest of DC's hallowed institutions and its leader " Howard Shalwitz. Many from the Woolly Mammoth h…
A bright young team of theater professionals brings Homer's epic to Washington for a fresh look at An Iliad, and the production packs a powerful punch. It may be just in time. Â Or maybe n…
