Your Ticket to Theatre News in MD, DC & VA!
To help celebrate the bicentennial of Verdi’s birth, The Lyric Opera Baltimore is presenting his tragic opera Rigoletto as the final selection for their season. If you are familiar with the design of The Lyric, you will know that the names of famous classical composers are etched magnificently on the top portions of the walls surrounding the [...]
The current popularity of composer Stephen Schwartz begins and ends with Wicked, so a National Symphony Orchestra Pops Concert saluting him at the Kennedy Center does so as well. Conductor Steven Reineke began with a medley of themes from the Oz derived musical marking its 10th anniversary and he ended with Jennifer Laura Thompson and Julia [...]
Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company is well known for its remarkable talent, fearlessness, and ingenuity in reproducing the Bard of Avon’s plays for a contemporary audience. The Winter’s Tale constitutes a particular challenge, because its tone shifts between the third and fourth acts between tragedy and comedy (the reason it is sometimes grouped with Shakespeare’s [...]
Toby’s Dinner Theatre of Columbia has hit all the marks with its fabulous regional premier of the four-time 2008 Tony Award-winning musical In the Heights. With music by Lin-Manuel Miranda and book by Quiara Alegría Hudes, it can best be described as a spicy stew of rap/hip-hop/musical/operetta. It is as fresh and infectious as the [...]
If you’ve ever participated in a writing class or workshop, you’ve likely been told to “write what you know.” It’s pretty standard advice for beginner artists, but may not yield much material if you’ve a limited supply of life experiences. Not to mention, telling someone else’s harrowing tale appeals to the people-watcher in all of [...]
The Colonial Players of Annapolis, a community fixture for decades in Maryland’s capital, has branched out into new and intriguing territory with its production of Sarah Ruhl’s Tony-nominated comedy about the wages of ecstasy, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play. Director Carol Youmans has assembled a wonderful cast and created just the sort [...]
“Wow,” said Lilly. That was about all she could say. “Wow.” That’s also what my daughter (also Lilly) said when we first saw the stage of Pumpkin Theatre’s production of Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse. The stage design (by Ryan Michael Haase) embodies the joy and enthusiasm found in the pages of Kevin Henkes’s delightful children’s [...]
The Kit Kat Girls, a live orchestra, and bittersweet love stories make for a fun night out at St. Mark’s church for the St. Mark’s Players’ performance of Cabaret. Directed by Rick Hayes, Cabaret is a jaunt through 1930′s Berlin during the cultural boom, and it performs the task of a real cabaret quite well: [...]
In the Washington Ballet’s latest, Septime Webre sets Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises as a vintage silent film. Its high production values, underwritten entirely by local dance mega-donors Bill and Eve Lilly, and excellent casting make the show a shoe-in for any audience. With boxing matches, can-can dancers, and a guest appearance from NPR White [...]
The collapse of the housing bubble in 2007 is considered one of the major causes of the recession. It in itself was caused by unscrupulous businessmen focused on short-term gain at the expense of long-term security. While David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross was written in the 1980s, it is a microcosm of the brutal business [...]
Hearing the great Tony Award winning Broadway baritone Brian Stokes Mitchell sing some of Broadway’s most famous songs is one of today’s great pleasures. Add to that The Choral Arts Society Chorus made up of 175 plus vocalists, conducted by Scott Tucker, and you have something truly memorable. This Mother’s Day concert entitled Broadway’s Show-Stoppers [...]
Michael Feinstein, the Gershwins, and dessert, “Who could ask for anything more?” On Thursday at The Patricia & Arthur Modell Performing Arts Center at The Lyric, Michael Feinstein was the featured artist at the spring fundraiser for the Myberberg Center which offers a variety of cultural, educational, and wellness programs for mature adults. Mr. Feinstein [...]
Adam Pascal’s career as a performer is twofold. He has been seen on Broadway in Elton John and Tim Rice’s Aida, Cabaret, the original cast of Rent and is currently playing Billy Flynn in the long running revival of Chicago. That is one side of Pascal’s talent. The other is that he is a very [...]
There’s something powerful about the straightforward, the clear and articulate, the simple—particularly in this age where we, though interested in the historical and the “antiquarian,“ rarely consider the artifact as it is. With Gilgamesh, Constellation Theatre’s world premiere production of the world’s oldest tale, poet Yusef Komunyakaa’s beautiful pitch-perfect text and dramatist Chad Gracia’s structurally edifying frame take [...]
