It’s amusing to me that on the 100th anniversary of the birth of the namesake of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, there are two popular, quite different musicals on either end of the Grand Foyer. What if ticket holders to the traveling national tour of “The Sound of Music” made it [...]
Ian Merrill Peakes begins and ends his role as “Timon of Athens” standing in the center of Folger Shakespeare Theatre’s stage. At the start, he’s basking in his glory as a prosperous master of the universe, happily dispersing his gold; in the end he’s alone, torn down, penniless emotionally, at the mercy of gods, or [...]
Lisa Hodsoll emerges as fully First Lady in The Klunch world premiere “Laura Bush Killed a Guy.” She’s got that soft West Texas accent, the omnipresent smile as shiny as her pearls, a cream colored ensemble, and poise to burn. How much poise? Well, during a matinee press performance Sunday at the aptly named Caos on F, [...]
As investigations into Russian influence on U.S. elections continue, here’s a development that has so far eluded Rachel Maddow: They may have also been behind the witches in “Macbeth.” So says a modern day version of Bard’s classic at the Shakespeare Theatre Company from inventive director Liesl Tommy. Tommy was the first woman of color [...]
Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home” first arose 15 years ago as one of those rare graphic novels that rose above all others, as Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” or Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” did before it, to further the form and broaden its acceptance beyond bound comics to something approaching literary and artistic pinnacles. Intensely personal, occasionally dark and [...]
Holly Twyford has a wonderfully blank expression she uses when taking in the madness all around her. She’s also very expressive when setting quill to paper in the rare wordless scene of “Or,” at the Round House Theatre in Bethesda. While busy with her pen, she chuckles at a witticism, begins to weep at a [...]
Nilaja Sun sits in the chair, absorbed in herself as the audience at Woolly Mammoth takes its seats for her electrifying one-woman “Pike St.” Sun may be familiar from her many roles on TV from Juliet on “Madam Secretary” to Irene on “30 Rock” and roles in shows from “Nurse Jackie” to “Louie.” Or from [...]
Bad singers make interesting stories. After Meryl Streep got an Oscar nomination for her role as the classical world’s “Florence Foster Jenkins,” last year, here comes Broadway’s Debra Monk, warbling the pop repertoire of a mid-1960s musical misfit in a new musical full of Great White Way pedigree. No less than Pulitzer Prize winner James [...]
Living in Connecticut eight years ago when a chimp being kept as a pet ripped the face off a neighbor, it was tough to see anything but stark horror in the attack. But there was a wealth of absurdity in the case of Travis, who appeared in TV commercials, occasionally drove the car and liked [...]
The theater space at the Spooky Action Theatre is so intimate you immediately feel you’re in the tiny cabin where all its action in Jez Butterworth’s play “The River” takes place. Not only do you watch the man rhapsodize about sea trout fly fishing on a moonless night from this old family-owned cabin, and witness [...]