Sunday, September 20, 2020
I spoke with Adam Turner, Artistic Director of the Virginia Opera, on Tuesday, September 15, about how a regional opera company weathers COVID and the shutdown of most live performance. Virg…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:39PMWith live performances shut down since March because of the COVID-19 pandemic, artists unemployed, and income streams disrupted, performing arts organizations continue to face the hardest of…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:35PMFriday, September 11, 2020
Theaters have gone dark during the pandemic, with little certainty about when or whether actors and audiences can again gather in the same space to tell and listen to stories that illuminate…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 06:34AMSunday, March 8, 2020
The Spitfire Grill was in Off-Broadway previews on 9/11. In part because its heartwarming, American roots/small-town spirited songs and characters struck a powerful emotional chord in the da…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:15AMMonday, March 2, 2020
Tales of wars, slaughters, betrayals, competing tribes and religions, and a few dominant women make the Book of Judges one of the more colorful segments of the Hebrew Bible. Camille Saint-Sa…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:23PMMonday, February 24, 2020
Adam Gwon’s 2009 show Ordinary Days could serve as the prototypical Off-Broadway chamber musical: four young characters navigate the Big City in search of their lives, in 19 songs over 80 …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:49PMMonday, February 17, 2020
Spoiler alert: Cinderella and the Prince live happily ever after. Of course, since Virginia Opera, like all opera companies of any size, prints a detailed synopsis in the program each patron…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:21AMTuesday, February 11, 2020
For an evening of dry wit and sophisticated, subtle humor, make your way…Oh forget it. Just come to Constellation Theatre’s The 39 Steps for a couple hours of cheesy lines, old situation…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:45PMSunday, February 9, 2020
What would it have felt like, I’ve sometimes wondered, to listen, in sublime surroundings, to sounds conveying the deepest devotions of Christian belief, long before the “melancholy, lon…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:34AMSunday, February 2, 2020
At Friendship Park, on the US-Mexico border just south of San Diego, from 10 am to 2 pm Saturdays and Sundays, 10 people at a time on the US side can see, and talk through a fence, with frie…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 05:26PMJohn Morogiello’s new “based-on-a true-story” play Comedy of Venice, having its debut performance at Gaithersburg’s Best Medicine Rep, centers on a feud between two 18th-century Vene…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:44AMSaturday, January 25, 2020
You will not this season see a more beautiful, emotionally wrenching portrayal of profound love than in Arena Stage’s production of Ursula Rani Sarma’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. Based on…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:10PMMonday, January 20, 2020
The pipeline in the title of Dominique Morisseau’s play is the “school-to-prison pipeline” affecting young African-American men. Fueled, as Studio Theatre’s dramaturgical notes expla…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:09PMTuesday, January 14, 2020
Sean Grennan’s Now and Then, receiving its East Coast premiere courtesy of Upcounty Theatre in Germantown, Maryland, deals in regret anticipated and recollected, and inquires about the pos…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:48AMMonday, December 23, 2019
At the outset, I will confess a bias: I much prefer listening to baroque pieces played in the style, and on the scale, of the time in which they were composed. Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messi…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:42AMSaturday, December 21, 2019
The character arc that carries Lerner and Loewe’s classic My Fair Lady belongs to Eliza Doolittle, as she rises from flower girl at Covent Garden to the belle of the embassy ball, from fer…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 04:07PMSunday, December 15, 2019
Based on a renowned short story by James Joyce, The Dead, now being presented by Scena Theatre, is a slice of the lives of polite, quiet desperation lived by genteel middle-class Dubliners i…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:08PMWednesday, December 11, 2019
In Samoa, 68 people – mostly children – have died of measles in recent weeks, victims of an abysmally low immunization rate resulting, in significant part, from misinformation spread on …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:32PMMonday, December 9, 2019
Hector Berlioz’s mid-19th-century L’Enfance du Christ is not quite an oratorio in the most familiar sense of that term. Nor is it quite an opera. Written piecemeal over many years by a c…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 03:15PMWednesday, November 27, 2019
“Curious” is the operative word in the title of Simon Stephens’ The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, now playing at the Round House Theatre. The protagonist, teenager Chr…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:01AMSunday, November 24, 2019
Venus Theatre’s staff don’t open the house until immediately before The Powers that Be begins, presenting audience members, as they take their seats, with the evening’s most arresting …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 10:25PMMonday, November 18, 2019
Virginia Opera’s artistic director Adam Turner, in his program note for contemporary composer Daniel Catán’s Il Postino, hastens to assure audiences that the company is working to dispe…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 02:42PMMonday, November 4, 2019
I’ve never been to Reading, PA, the location of Lynn Nottage’s searing 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, now playing at Silver Spring Stage, but my life has been bracketed by livi…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 12:48PMWednesday, October 30, 2019
Canadian playwright Norman Yeung’s Theory, in its American premiere at Mosaic Theater, seeks to be, in the words of Mosaic’s press release, “a hot button play for our digital moment.…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:25AMMonday, October 28, 2019
Getting killed multiple times in a single production can be great fun (my personal best is three). In Reston Community Players’ (RCP) A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Patrick Grah…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:38AMSaturday, October 26, 2019
How do you put a human face on a difficult, complex subject the natural habitat of which may more likely be a law review article than a stage? Such is playwright Sharyn Rothstein’s task in…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:08AMWednesday, October 23, 2019
From its beginnings as a very low-budget 1960 Roger Corman B-picture horror flick (a young Jack Nicholson had a minor role), Little Shop of Horrors has been an irresistible salad of corrupte…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:20PMTuesday, October 8, 2019
Snow White is bossy. Cinderella is a ditzy dim bulb. Sleeping Beauty not only sleeps a lot but snores. Belle is going nuts from talking to inanimate objects. Mulan likes girls. Just what …
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 09:50AMSaturday, October 5, 2019
Black early 20th-century celebrity heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson has had as irresistible a pull on subsequent playwrights and filmmakers as he did on the public of his day. Alrea…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 08:45PMMonday, September 23, 2019
Ambiguous loss that binds two people together while pushing them apart. Incompatible paths of grief that alienate each other’s only source of connection. The dominating presence of someone…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 01:58PMSunday, September 22, 2019
Andrew Lloyd Webber catapulted to unprecedented West End and Broadway success with his musical extravaganza Cats, based on a 1939 collection of light verse by the otherwise modernist poet, T…
Linked From DC Metro Theater Arts at 11:42AM 
