Your Ticket to Theatre News in MD, DC & VA!
Here is the scenario. A cricket in Connecticut gets a whiff of some food in a picnic basket and ends up in a busy Times Square subway station where he becomes a sensation for his musical talents. How do you translate this to the stage? Well…. you commission a second generation world class musician to [...]
The Washington National Opera revives the Broadway standard Show Boat for local audiences. In the program notes by Thomas May, we find out the original Hammerstein libretto was first performed in Washington DC at the National Theatre on November 15, 1927. Originally running 4 hours, this racially charged stage show is an adaptation of Pulitzer [...]
Centerstage is up and running with the second half of their Raisin Cycle, Beneatha’s Place, Playwright and Artistic Director Kwame Kwei-Armah’s impressive complement and response to their concurrent production of Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park. While the latter play expands the story of the family home in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, Beneatha’s Place [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In Club de Caballeros (Rotos de amor), or The Gentleman’s Club (Love Torn), we are able to see the truly desperate lengths that men will go to in order to achieve love. This hysterical comedy by Argentinean Playwright Rafael Bruza demonstrates this through four men who attempt to heal their broken hearts by rather ridiculous [...]
Synetic Theater, that theatre best known for its “wordless” Shakespeares, or wordless Jekyll & Hydes—or wordless “anything”—has decided to speak in its new production of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers. Then again, what Synetic is also known for is risk-taking (as if a theatre that offers an original production [adaptation] with each new show weren’t taking a huge [...]
Yes. This is another story about people taking off their clothes in front of strangers. Only there are no busty Hollywood starlets nor do the characters bear any semblance of the hunks who star in Magic Mike. But there’s a reason The Full Monty is still one of the most popular musicals in the country. [...]
Return with me now to a day gone by. When musicals had big orchestras, solid storylines, great music, and not a chandelier or helicopter in sight. MTG readers, now through May 26th you can see something that has all that. All you have to do is go and get a ticket to Washington National Opera’s [...]
On Sunday, May 5th, women in their fancy gowns and men in their dapper tuxedos turned out to help support the 21st annual Kennedy Center Spring Gala which provides critical funding to support the Center’s performances, education, and outreach initiatives. The centerpiece of the gala was a performance of a concert version of the musical My [...]
“If music be the food of love, play on.” And if music be not the food? Play on anyway because Folger Theatre’s production of Twelfth Night is nothing short of a feast of delightful visuals and characters, moments of kindness and devilish high jinx, sounds of the bawdy and faces from just this side of madness. In other words, [...]
Jon Robin Baitz’s Tony Award winning play Other Desert Cities is one of those plays that upon first viewing in NYC I said “Wow!!” I found it to be extremely well acted and really well written. The story is very dramatic, as it explores what happens when a child, who has had a breakdown, comes [...]
