The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling is the quintessential coming-of-age story: Mowgli, abandoned as an infant in the jungles of India, is raised by a pack of wolves and other creatures, who t…
In a convent of cloistered Catholic nuns, a baby lies in a wastebasket. She has lived for less than an hour, before being strangled with her own umbilical cord. In another part of the room, …
Abstinence and sex. Sex and abstinence. They've long vexed the masses, from noble to peasant as far back as the 1700s, when British writer Elizabeth Inchbald translated a German play roughly…
In White Pearl, playwright Anchuli Felicia King quickly throws the audience into a keenly contemporary conflict: a viral social media PR crisis, with a company accused of racism. Inspired by…
To mark and honor the thirtieth anniversary of Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, the Alliance for New Music-Theatre is presenting two one-act plays to honor the revolution's leader, the di…
By 1970, Washington, DC had long been a major college town; home to tens of thousands of young people who were trying to define their generation in opposition to the dominant values of their…
Jon Fosse's Sea is a tricky play to connect with. Its inhabitants seem at times to be on a boat ("I am the Shipmaster!" one insists, over and over), but it's clear early on that the setting'…
Imagine that you are a child and you are exploring your grandmother's closets. Or you're an adult whose grandmother has died and it's your responsibility to go to their home and sort thr…
A Chorus Line is known as one of the most pared-down, starkly intimate "song-and-dance shows" in the Broadway canon. On a barren stage"devoid of any scenery or set but for a wall of floor to…
Peter Dinklage's singing voice would not normally qualify him for a role in a musical, unless in a Disney animated movie as a singing rhinoceros. But Rex Harrison couldn't really sing either…
Wild things abound in this production of Washington National Opera's The Magic Flute, currently playing at the Kennedy Center. With Maurice Sendak's artwork at its forefront, the opera's…
In theory, Dhana and the Rosebuds, a theater-dance hybrid about a Syrian emigree seeking her refugee grandmother, should be compelling. It is topical. Its wedding of abstract and ritualized …
Bella Abzug spoke at my junior high school graduation, until Donna Florio's mother told her to shut up. "This is my daughter's graduation, not a political rally." Â Abzug paused, apologize…
In 2013, NBC made a splash in event television by airing The Sound of Music Live!, attracting over 18 million viewers to a live telecast of the Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musical. Ever si…
Annalisa Dias, member of The Welders playwrights collective, is not one to shy away from multiple, deeply involved, projects. When we spoke on the phone, she had just returned from London, a…
The Lansburgh Theatre is now the Michael R. Klein Theatre, Shakespeare Theatre Company announced at its Gala on November 4, 2019. The new name recognizes local philanthropist Michael R. Klei…
"History does not always repeat itself," wrote science fiction writer and editor of Astounding Science Fiction, John W. Campbell Jr. "Sometimes it just yells, 'Can't you remember anything I …
You'd think the big perk of being king is being able to do whatever you want. That is tragically not the case with Edward II, the duty-bound and defiant monarch of E2, an ambitious and sober…
The Arlington-based Signature Theatre announced today that it will add a brand new production of Mamma Mia! to its season, and produce the show The Anthem, one of the major concert venues in…
Newsies, the movie, established a cult following in 1992, with a pre-Dark Knight Christian Bale playing Jack Kelly, a 17-year-old newspaper hawker in New York City who leads the 1899 newsboy…
A doleful ballad fittingly eases you into Quotidian Theatre Company's (QTC's) lovingly rendered production of Conor McPherson's Port Authority. Three generations of Irishmen then introduce t…
If you were given free reign to say whatever you want about anything you want…how far would you go? And if you were the moderator of that kind of environment, at what point would you inter…
Freestyle Love Supreme is not so much Lin-Manuel Miranda's Broadway follow-up to Hamilton as it is a subsidiary of Lin-Manuel Inc. The hip-hop improv group that Miranda co-founded 16 years a…
What takes precedent: individual privacy, or public information? Right to Be Forgotten, making its world premiere at Arena Stage, is remarkably nuanced in its exploration of the big debates …
It was March in Los Angeles when actress and dancer Emily Tyra was out jogging and she was unnerved by a feeling she had never felt before. She immediately went home and told her husband, an…