Monday, December 12, 2016
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is like any play by Oscar Wilde, except when it isn’t. Wilde punctured the piety and pomposity of 19th-century England, to show us the underbelly of lust and g…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:24AMFriday, December 9, 2016
A play like this, where actors play fictional actors who play roles in an entirely different play, gives you a sort of double vision. You see not Joe Brack playing George Bailey, but Jake La…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:54PMMonday, November 28, 2016
In Alana Valentine’s Soft Revolution, Meera Narasimhan as Aunt Sarrinah cooks a feast of Afghani foods for herself and her niece Shafana (Nayab Hussain). After the production you will …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:06AMSaturday, November 26, 2016
This may be the best thing you’ll see in theater all year, so hold on — to your hat, to your significant other, to your life. We are borne to the land; it is on land that we beca…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 06:18PMTuesday, November 22, 2016
You are in Church. The magnificent voices of the choir (opening night was the Refreshing Spring Church of God in Christ James E. Jordan Jr. Choir) rise in song. You see them, in Theater J&#…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:12PMMonday, November 21, 2016
Playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose Eurydice has just closed at NextStop Theatre in Herndon, called upon writers to work “with new urgency” as she accepted the Steinberg Distinguished …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:02AMMonday, October 31, 2016
In the ancient tale immortalized by Ovid, the great poet and singer Orpheus married a woman named Eurydice. Shortly after the wedding, a poisonous snake bit Eurydice, and she died. Orpheus w…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:12AMMonday, October 24, 2016
It is a brave company which takes on Hamlet, the most difficult play in the Bard’s canon and one of the most difficult plays in the English language. When done correctly, it yields not…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:21AMTuesday, October 4, 2016
There is art, and there is proselytizing. Great art can contain proselytizing — if you doubt me, go to Round House this month — but proselytizing is not art. That, in a nu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:08PMThis isn’t Dante’s Inferno. It isn’t disco inferno either. I don’t know whose inferno this is. But it’s not Dante’s. Dante’s Inferno is a story of a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:52AMTuesday, September 27, 2016
All right. Let me get to the hard part first. Had Rhoda Lerman’s play, now being given a vigorous and effective production at Compass Rose Theater, simply been called A Secret Journey …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03AMFriday, September 23, 2016
theatreWashington’s annual theatreWeek is with us again, and this year it’s lasting a little more than a week — until October 2. Thirty-four Washington-area theaters are …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:45AMBranden Jacobs-Jenkins, the DC-born playwright whose Appropriate and An Octoroon astonished audiences at Woolly Mammoth, has won a MacArthur Fellows Award — also know as a “geniu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:14AMExcluding Shakespeare and holiday plays, eleven of the twelve plays being produced in America this season have either found a home in a DC-area theater or will do so soon. The most-produced …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:14AMWednesday, September 21, 2016
The Stadium glows in the embrace of the fading afternoon Sun. The infield is as smooth and manicured as a billiard table. A cooling breeze floats in from the Potomac, wafting over the gorgeo…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:10AMSaturday, September 17, 2016
Edward Albee, the seminal American playwright and three-time Pulitzer winner who is generally considered the greatest playwright of the latter half of the twentieth century, died yesterday a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:03AMMonday, September 12, 2016
We know who Clive (John Scherer) is: square-jawed, middle-aged, sandy-haired with a splash of white at the temples, refined of voice, of imperial bearing — why, he is the very model of…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:08PMMonday, August 22, 2016
If you’re like me, you’ve already done your Christmas shopping, filled out your budget for the next fiscal year, and made arrangements for your final repose after The Even…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:48PMWednesday, August 10, 2016
Here’s how you know you’re in a Martin McDonagh comedy: Father Welsh (Chris Strezin), Leenane Village’s dipsomaniacal priest, wanders into the fractious home of the Connor …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:09AMMonday, August 8, 2016
Trey Graham will headline as DC Theatre Scene makes its second annual appearance at the Smithsonian Associates’ preview of the upcoming theater year. Graham, the DCTS writer who won t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:46PMMonday, July 18, 2016
Rapists and Drug Dealers has nothing to do with rapists and drug dealers, except perhaps in the dim mind of a political wannabe. Nor is it a “metaphor for the immigrant experience,R…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:31AMTuesday, July 12, 2016
Eight years ago, the Molotov Theatre Group made its debut with Blood, Sweat and Fears, a trilogy of Grand Guignol plays, at the late, lamented Playbill Cafe. I reviewed it then. (Wait! Eight…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:05AMMonday, July 11, 2016
Diana Brown and Susan Jackson as Red and Marion respectively work hard in Death Be Not Loud!, but to what end? Browns’ Red spends two scenes in direct address, ostensibly to her dead m…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 07:40AMSunday, July 10, 2016
Here, let me be completely honest with you. I was not looking forward to this show. I had reviewed another play by playwright Luigi Laraia for Fringe last year and was not pleased. La…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:55PMLike a well-made vodka punch, Kate Robards’ well-made story sneaks up on you. It starts out as a lighthearted account of how she (like Horatio Alger!) overcame her impoverished roots b…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:10AMSaturday, July 9, 2016
Among all the major Shakespeare characters, the one least susceptible to a one-actor treatment may be Romeo Montague, the doomed lover in Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet, Lear, Shylock, Othello a…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:56PMWe had never had a President like Richard Nixon before we elected him in 1968, and we will never have one like him again. He was, to put it plainly, a crook; he installed an atmosphere of la…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:50AMFriday, July 8, 2016
Allen Drury’s brilliant novel, Advise and Consent, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. In it, the weaselly Senator Freddie Van Ackerman of Wyoming threatens to expose a gay liaison which t…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:31PM In the end, the Defense of Marriage Act was always constitutionally suspect. Under DOMA, a state which did not recognize same-sex marriage was not obliged to respect such a marriage i…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:01AMWednesday, June 29, 2016
Back in the day in the French Quarter of Louisiana, there was a custom among the upper crust: when a boy reached the age of fourteen or so, he moved from the family manse to an outbuilding, …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:15PMMonday, June 27, 2016
The Arlington-based WSC Avant Bard announced today that it will devote its upcoming three-play season to the kind of theater for which it is best known: original spins on classic plays. The …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:37AM 
