All stories by Tim Treanor on BroadwayStars

Saturday, February 29, 2020

Review: Actors’ take-over of ASC’s Much Ado About Nothing finds big laughs in Shakespeare’s comedy by Tim Treanor

At Shakespeare Theatre’s 2020 mock court Thursday night, the veteran Shakespearian actor Ed Gero described the special challenges facing a theater artist who takes on one of the Bard’s w…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:24PM
Friday, February 28, 2020

Shakespeare Theatre mock trial gives a speedy – and witty – hearing in The Trial of Peter Pan by Tim Treanor

Peter Pan, having swept the Darling children up into the sky with fairy dust, brought them to Neverland, a venue full of pirates and mermaids. There, along with the lost boys, they did battl…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:42PM
Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Arena Stage announces its history-focused 2020-2021 season by Tim Treanor

American History — some real, some imagined — will mark Arena’s ten-production 2020-2021 season. The inaugural show at the Mead Center for American Theater will be a world-premiere mus…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:18PM
Tuesday, February 4, 2020

2020 Helen Hayes Award nominees announced. Most recognized: Olney Theatre Center and Constellation’s Little Shop of Horrors by Tim Treanor

Olney Theatre Center leads the pack of company nominations with 27 nods for this year’s Helen Hayes Awards, theatreWashington announced last night at its annual kickoff to the Helen Hayes …

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:24PM
Monday, February 3, 2020

Folger Theatre’s 2020-21 season, reporting not only what but where by Tim Treanor

Folger Theatre will be out-of-house for the 2020-21 season while the venerable Folger Shakespeare Library undergoes renovation. To get its audiences ready for the pleasures yet to be, the co…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PM
Friday, January 31, 2020

Review: From World Stages, Grey Rock. Against all odds, a Palestinian builds a rocket to the moon by Tim Treanor

America “should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon, and returning him safely to the earth,” said John Kennedy, in whose building…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:03PM
Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Rep Stage becomes the first company to announce its 2020-2021 season by Tim Treanor

Love and death, murder and ghosts will raise their occasionally ugly but dramatically satisfying heads in Rep Stage’s 2020-2021 four-play season, the company announced Friday. The Rep Stag…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:06PM
Thursday, January 16, 2020

7 upcoming plays which are about to tell us where we lost our humanity and where we can find it again. by Tim Treanor

Tim Treanor was asked to recommend 7 plays for the lecture DC Theatre Season 2020 held January 14 in the Smithsonian’s S. Dillon Ripley Center.  Since we’ve had several requests for his…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PM
Thursday, December 26, 2019

Victor Shargai, major philanthropist and theatre supporter, has died. by Tim Treanor

Victor Shargai, an actor, costume designer, interior designer, philanthropist, and Washington theater leader died on Christmas Eve at the age of 83 after a brief illness. Shargai was the lon…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:42PM
Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Review: Madeline’s Christmas at Creative Cauldron by Tim Treanor

In an old house in Paris, covered in vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines. And at Creative Cauldron, for their Christmas thing, the twelve little girls get up and sing. Oh,…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:32AM
Wednesday, December 4, 2019

Review: The Magic Duel, a mystifying show. Believe it or not. by Tim Treanor

In the genteel Mayflower Hotel, where J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson often ate dinner alone together, Mark Phillips and Ryan Phillips are engaged in a magic duel. By “magic duel” I don…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03AM
Wednesday, November 20, 2019

Review: Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra gets a lusty, lively staging at ASC by Tim Treanor

Antony and Cleopatra is Shakespeare’s saga of love and war, in which — spoiler alert — war wins. Our situation is this: Julius Caesar has been assassinated and, after some skirmishing,…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 05:24PM
Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Review: The Willard Suitcases. Pack your bag to catch this ingeniously staged new musical at ASC by Tim Treanor

The end of your life starts slowly, and after some incomprehensible incident. Everything seems dreamlike. They are talking to you – the policeman, the lawyer, the judge, the doctor – and…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:18AM
Wednesday, November 13, 2019

Review: Edward Albee’s Occupant at Theater J by Tim Treanor

“It’s not the person,” cries the sculptor Louise Nevelson (Susan Rome) in Edward Albee’s Occupant, “It’s the work they do!” Would be it that Albee had heeded his character’s …

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:03PM
Monday, November 11, 2019

Review: Agnes of God, Factory 449’s devastating look at religious faith and science by Tim Treanor

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, …

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:48PM
Thursday, October 17, 2019

Newly-renamed Avant Bard Theatre announces its 3-play season by Tim Treanor

Avant Bard Theatre, formerly known as WSC Avant Bard (and before that, as Washington Shakespeare Company), will mark its 30th anniversary with a new name, and a three-play season, Artistic D…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:06PM
Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Louis Altarescu and Alan Friedman, recipients of 2019 Gary Maker Audience Award. by Tim Treanor

Louis Altarescu and Alan Friedman, well known volunteer ushers and theater enthusiasts until Friedman’s untimely death last month, have been selected to receive the 2019 Gary Maker Audienc…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:48AM
Monday, October 7, 2019

Review: The Royale . Olney Theatre’s boxing drama wins in a knock out by Tim Treanor

If baseball represents the joy of sport — its season concluding with popped champagne corks and ticker tape parades for the winners and the promise of next year for the losers — then box…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:12PM
Friday, September 13, 2019

Review: 1 Henry IV at Folger Theatre. Gero is a marvelous Falstaff, but it’s the King’s play by Tim Treanor

Henry IV, Part 1 is the best of the Shakespearean histories, because it is a redemption story — not of Prince Hal (Avery Whitted), who rose from his Eastcheap debauchery to become England�…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PM
Tuesday, September 10, 2019

Review: Doubt: A Parable. Sarah Marshall leads Studio’s powerful production of Shanley’s heartbreaking play by Tim Treanor

The titular doubt in John Patrick Shanley’s classic play, now being given a rigorous yet nuanced treatment at Studio Theatre, is not about whether the intense, charismatic Father Brendan F…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:06PM
Thursday, August 15, 2019

How to get cast in the Washington DC area: auditions and other notes from Nan Ficca by Tim Treanor

So you’re an actor who has just blown in from Oregon and you’d like to show your stuff to a D.C. casting director. Or you’re a WATCH-award winning community theatre actor who wants to …

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:54PM
Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Capital Fringe review: From Divorce to Restoration by Tim Treanor

It is part poem, part prayer service, and part therapy session, but the first thing that will strike you about From Divorce to Restoration is its name. Restoration? Really? Aside from death,…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:03AM
Monday, July 22, 2019

Review: Sam Hunter’s The Few: excellent performances from Unexpected Stage by Tim Treanor

“Only connect,” wrote the novelist E.M. Forster, “Live in fragments no longer.” Ah, but that’s easier said than done, E.M., particularly in the windblown wilds of the Western U.S.,…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:42PM
Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Review: Michael Urie returns as Hamlet in STC’s rocket ship of a production by Tim Treanor

Simon Godwin is poised to take the reins of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, but the presence of Michael Kahn hangs over it like a mist. If you have any question, you should see the free-for…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 04:42PM
Monday, July 15, 2019

Capital Fringe review: Caribbean Command by Tim Treanor

Imagine that you are a soldier — an intelligence analyst — deployed to the Caribbean Command in Key West, Florida. Your daily tasks involve reading reports and commenting on them in air-…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AM
Saturday, July 13, 2019

Capital Fringe review: The Hound by Tim Treanor

Although he wrote until his death in 1937, the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft was resolutely of the 19th century. His lurid prose, which frequently invoked evil in its most hideous forms, pres…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:24PM

Capital Fringe review: What I’ve all been waiting for by Tim Treanor

Rob Rafferty’s been waiting for what we have all been waiting for — which is to say, for the fate which awaits us all. Poor Rob has been diagnosed with Brain Crabs, and so is reminded th…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:24PM
Wednesday, July 10, 2019

Capital Fringe review: Shakespeare’s Worst by Tim Treanor

Let’s get this out of the way first. Two Gentlemen of Verona is not Shakespeare’s worst play. Not by a long shot; not in a universe which has Timon of Athens and Coriolanus and Two Noble…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:24PM

Fringe review: Surfacing: An Inventory of Helplessness by Tim Treanor

Surfacing: An Inventory of Helplessness is less a story than a meditation on a condition. And the condition is grim. A (Yvonne Paretsky) seeks refuge in Vienna. The law is that if she can es…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PM
Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Review: A Welcome Guest (a Psychotic Fairy Tale) at Contemporary American Theater Festival by Tim Treanor

In 2010, the Contemporary American Theater Festival staged something called The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show. It was the first musical they ever did. They’ve never done one since. The p…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:06PM

Review: Wrecked at Contemporary American Theater Festival by Tim Treanor

In Hillel Mitelpunkt’s The Accident, a self-involved man, somewhat drunk, hits and kills a Chinese immigrant at about eighty miles per hour. Then, with his passenger, an equally self-invol…

SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:06PM

All that Chat

2023-2024 BROADWAY SEASON
May 30, 2023: Grey House - Lyceum Theatre
Jun 26, 2023: Just For Us - Hudson Theatre
Jul 24, 2023: The Cottage - Hayes Theater
Nov 16, 2023: Spamalot - St. James Theatre
Dec 18, 2023: Appropriate - Hayes Theater
Mar 07, 2024: Doubt - Todd Haimes Theatre
Apr 14, 2024: Lempicka - Longacre Theatre
Apr 17, 2024: The Wiz - Marquis Theatre
Apr 18, 2024: Suffs - Music Box Theatre
Apr 25, 2024: Mother Play - Hayes Theater
Jun 10, 2024: The Drama Desk Awards