Emilie is like a perfectly icy glass of champagne laced with bitters. Avant Bard's scintillating production of Lauren Gunderson's play about Enlightenment-era scientific genius and mistress …
Love is tragic and sumptuous in the Mariinsky Ballet's La Bayadère. At the Kennedy Center this week, under director Valery Gergiev and acting ballet director Yuri Fateev, the production " i…
This past weekend, En Garde Arts brought a new multimedia documentary theatre piece to the Kennedy Center. True to the best of its genre, Wilderness strikes right at the core with devastatin…
There's something noble in sticking with your family no matter what, but there's also something noble in finally cutting ties with a toxic parent. The Price grinds that contradiction against…
Folger Theatre is transformed dramatically for their production of Antony and Cleopatra, and that dramatic transformation also applies to the play itself. Thus is one of Shakespeare's denser…
One doesn't go to Urban Arias expecting masterpieces. The whole adventure is about sharing in Founder and Artistic Director Robert Wood's risk-taking in mounting new or almost new operatic w…
You know how it is with celebrities: you don’t hear from them for awhile, you assume they’re dead. Until they put out a bestseller that refutes/justifies/excuses everything they&…
The Siege, a play dramatizing the 2002 siege by armed Palestinians of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, is in several ways the exact opposite of Oslo, the last drama about the Palesti…
The Effect is a beautiful rumination on what love is"a combination of naturally occurring chemicals with which the brain floods the body. Or something altogether different. Something control…
The best thing about The Smartest Girl in the World is that it is not actually about how smart the titular girl is, but about how much she learns from her brother, and how much her brother l…
It isn't every day that you're asked to play God, so when 7-time Helen Hayes-nominated actor Tom Story was offered the chance to take on the titular role in Signature Theatre's production of…
Experiencing a Matthew Bourne ballet is like indulging in a whole box of Christmas crackers from Harrods " stuffed with surprises. It also reminds me of reading something by the late writer …
I'll Get You Back Again uses a band’s reunion as the basis for a combined comedy, drama, memory play, and meditation on the meaning of life. While the Round House Theatre world premier…
In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis set sail from Hamburg for Cuba with 937 passenger, most of them German Jews hoping to begin new lives away from the Nazis. Their hopes were based on a Cuban law w…
What is it about the idea of a mistress? Throughout history the "other woman" has been called all kind of names under the sun, shunned, cast-out, run out of town, off the land " or behea…
In the wake of an historically deadly mass shooting and a historically unpopular president comes a musical comedy of sorts about guns, presidents, and their tragic interplay from Lincoln to …
It took Olney Theatre, surprisingly, 80 seasons to get around to Thornton Wilder's iconic Our Town, and with acclaimed director Aaron Posner at the helm, they tackle the challenge of what th…
A writer's life is peculiarly isolated and the opening sequence of Are you now, or have you ever been… makes that abundantly clear. A typewriter sits on a table with a stack of papers …
Another top-notch offering for young audiences began this past weekend: Blancaflor, the latest in the GALita series of theatre for children. GAlita is the arm of GALA Hispanic Theatre that c…
Caravanning to the stars and beyond"to a planet of flowers somewhere at the edge of the universe"is a nice coda to a long week. Even if it is a journey designed for kids. Music, after all, i…
America may be in a new cold war with Putin, but the Washington Ballet this week takes Russia into a white-hot embrace. In her first season last year as artistic director, former American Ba…
"…It may strike you more like a high mass to low instincts … the characters are all id; desperately (and fueled by cocaine and bathtub gin) hoping to express their secret selves, and…
Langston Hughes was a noted poet, social activist, novelist, playwright and one of the earliest innovators of jazz poetry. It's no wonder that the literary giant got a "shout out" in Rent's …
On Tuesday, Oct. 10, the DC theater community is invited to the Washington Area Performing Arts Video Archive's (WAPAVA) Richard Bauer Award celebration at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, in an …
As the country grieves over yet another mass shooting and grapples with the question of what could drive anyone to contemplate such a hideous act, two productions of the Stephen Sondheim/…