The Duchess of Malfi is a morality play with no morals, a revenge play in which no one’s revenged, except accidentally; a tragedy in which so many people get killed that there’s …
Before becoming a prominent director in D.C., Matthew Gardiner, Signature Theatre's associate artistic director, was a promising ballet dancer. Gardiner studied at The Washington Ballet star…
Pour Disney princess movies, Nicholas and Alexandra, Dr. Zhivago, Annie, My Fair Lady, and An American in Paris in a mixer, hit blend, and you'll end up with Anastasia, a historically and na…
The Washington Ballet's Contemporary Masters program, which opened Wednesday night at the Harman Center for the Arts and continues through Sunday, is a master class in late 20th Century mode…
Celebrating the life of Ntozake Shange (1948 – 2018). May our words of praise and gratitude, like sparks drawn upward to the sky, ascend to meet her. From performer and friend, Rene…
The first time they met in western New York, in the fall of 1849, playwright Mat Smart imagines, Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony would have had a wary interchange. Both are stron…
When Rick Foucheux retired from acting, he did so as one of the most popular, award-winning, Â one might even say beloved performers in town. Many bemoaned the prospect of no more Foucheux…
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 …
The masochist believes in the transformative power of magic, of the variety that the goddess Circe used to turn Odysseus’ men into swine. To the masochist, the beloved is a goddess (Ve…
Local playwright Patrick Flynn has spent the last two years developing his new comedy about growing up and proving how"adults can be idiots, just like children." Sheila and Moby recei…
The white-hot rage and caustic bitterness against de-industrialization, unemployment, minorities, and immigrants, not to mention races and religions other than white and Christian, may have …
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…
East of Eden is an American classic, a huge and sprawling novel, stretching from the Civil War to World War I and from California to Connecticut. John Steinbeck — who won the Pulitzer …
Can't Pay, Won't Pay! could just as easily be titled "I Love Antonia" for the heroine's strong similarities to Lucille Ball and the crazily comic situations navigated by two working class co…
The novelist, poet, performer and playwright Ntozake Shange, best known for her 1976 Obie-winning choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, died last…
You’re a fifteen-year-old boy named Will, and your eighteen-year-old brother has been shot. Shawn was your friend, your protector, and your teacher ever since your father was killed, a…
Darkness, corpses, catacombs, and cats: welcome to the world of Edgar Allan Poe. His stories embody the spirit of Halloween, which is why it's fitting that We Happy Few is performing his…
Sitting in a circle of chairs facing inwards, arranged at the outermost edges of an otherwise empty stage, it is impossible to discern the actors from the audience. There is a playful te…
Hank Dutt has played the viola in the Kronos Quartet, the world’s most famous avant-garde string quartet, for over forty years. His face is still gorgeous; his cheekbones sit as high a…
I'll bet my mutant Venus fly trap you know this show. Little Shop of Horrors took off-Broadway by storm in the 1980s, the talented team of book writer and lyricist Howard Ashman and compo…
The 2018 Charm City Fringe Festival returns to the Bromo Arts District with 23 productions and more than 80 performances taking place between November 1 and November 11. Baltimore talent for…
While John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath have historically been on high school reading lists for decades, one of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner's more ambitious wo…
Elaine May is back on a Broadway stage after more than 50 years, and making the most of it in The Waverly Gallery, Kenneth Lonergan's meticulously observed, funny and sad play about a woman'…
The challenge of finding a fresh take on any play by The Bard has foiled many an artist, but Avant Bard joyfully clears that hurdle with Illyria, or What You Will, a clever reimagining of Tw…
A meditation on the arc of a lifetime. A message piece about soul-eroding communication technology. A frenetic exploration of Jung's notion of male and female psychic elements. Such was the …