Category Archives: Theatre

So many Romanovs these days! There’s Matthew Weiner’s Amazon series in which various supposed survivors of the doomed royal line emerges in modern day, with a new episode every Friday. And now there’s “Anastasia,” the popular musical that was just installed for a month-long run at the Kennedy Center. It’s based on the 1997 animated [...]

What was it like 21 years ago when Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” premiered off Broadway? It was more shocking, maybe; probably more balanced with laughs; and perhaps challenging in presenting audiences with a story of ongoing, predatory pedophilia from a family member. The D.C.-born playwright had developed it with another D.C. theater [...]

The innocent woman who had just been groped by a powerful man intent on defiling her turns to the audience and asks plaintively, “To whom should I complain?” and even more starkly: “Who would believe me?” The powerful man underscores her dilemma. “Who will believe you?” he says. “My unsoiled name, the austereness of my [...]

“Seinfeld” might have been a TV show about nothing, but shows by the Upright Citizens Brigade at Woolly Mammoth literally begin with nothing. The “Four Gorgeous Women!” as they kept calling themselves, came out on stage (a fifth person, a guy, who was listed in the program, didn’t materialize). And aside from a sci-fi themed [...]

The kind of well-worn rock club set designer Matthew J. Keenan creates for the production of Laura  Easton’s “The Undeniable Sound of Right Now” at the Keegan Theatre is so authentic, with its decades of rock posters, stickers and graffiti, you can almost smell the stale beer in the floorboards. The instincts not to visit [...]

It seemed like a clever in-joke when the first lobby announcement at the Shakespeare Theatre Company began, “We appreciate your patience…” It was opening night for Druid’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” so of course the whole evening was about patience. The announcement was about the delay in opening doors to the house, [...]

For being the centennial of Ingmar Bergman’s birth, there seems to be very little evidence of the Swedish director’s work around. It’s hard to find even his best known films; his name is known to some generations only as a reference in the work of Woody Allen. And the average age of the opening night [...]