Andrew Long, Ted van Griethuysen, and Aubrey K. Deeker form an uneasy alliance in Antony and Cleopatra. Photo by Carol Pratt. Antony and Cleopatra is a sprawling, lumbering beast of a play — war, international intrigue, doomed love — but the best stuff in the Shakespeare Theatre’s current production is the smallest stuff: he-said/she-said, jealousy, drunkenness. When Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, learns from a rightly mortified messenger that Antony, the Roman General with whom......

Sure, with Folger Theater, two Shakespeare Theaters, and Washington Shakespeare Company all alive and kicking in D.C. (not to mention Synetic's silent Shakespeare productions), it's not exactly hard to get your Bard fix in this city. But what do all those companies have in common? You have to pay for them. That's what's so awesome about the Shakespeare Free For All at Carter Barron Amphitheatre, which begins tonight and ends June 1: you don't have......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Major Release: There Will Be Blood We should have held our tongues on our top 10 for the year until the actual end of the year. Paul Thomas Anderson's new film slipped in just under the 2007 wire in limited release last week, and the director channels John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, and his own wild-eyed imagination......

The DC theater community is starting the year off right with...no more productions of A Christmas Carol. Seriously, there's plenty to like in January, from gutsy works to brand-new musicals. The Neo-Futurists (pictured) are back! Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, which our critic Chris Klimek loved, makes a return engagement at Woolly Mammoth (Jan. 4). Stick 'em up! The American Century Theater gets nostalgic for police dramas with their production of Cops......

FRIDAY >> The legendary Patti Smith is at the 9:30 Club tonight, and tickets are incredibly still available for $25. Doors at 9, show at 10 p.m. >> The idea of attending a lighting display, particularly after Christmas, might sound a bit cheesy. But the Garden of Lights in Wheaton might just change your mind. The designer tours the county gardens each year for inspiration for his display; this year, it invokes the four seasons.......

Who knew the image of Jackie Kennedy could be so disturbing? The icon is central to the proceedings of The House of Yes, the dark, intriguing, and frequently funny play being staged by Washington Shakespeare Company. The piece is being done in repertory with another contemporary work, Kafka's Dick, at Clark Street Playhouse. Dysfunctional families are hardly untapped territory for artistic exploration, but the snobby Pascals definitely have more than the usual set of quirks.......

If you really must attend a holiday concert, make it something musicologically interesting. In what has become an annual tradition (see the 2005 and 2006 installments), the Folger Consort is presenting the most appealing and satisfying Christmas concert in the city. More than just a concert, it is a staged production of the Second Shepherds' Play, an English mystery play from the Towneley cycle. Director Mary Hall Surface began by modernizing the play's Middle English......

Good news in time for Christmas this year; the Warehouse Theater will continue to operate through next summer, according to the institution. The venue is currently hosting Scena Theater's The Maids and will have new shows in February and March. That also means it remains a venue for next year's Fringe Festival. The Warehouse is still looking for a new home. Despite the usual winter doldrums that December brings, there are still a number of......

December begins tomorrow, and that means only one thing: it's time to take that special person in your life to a holiday concert. Do you want to subject him or her to the same old carols, something historical, or something really weird? Here is a list of your options, not including the many performances of Handel's Messiah or The Nutcracker, to be previewed tomorrow. THE BEST OF THE BEST: >> For those who never want......

Shakespeare Theater's Tamburlaine has a snazzy new venue, a gravitas-heavy star and some looming special effects. If only the play were a little more interesting. Maybe Rorschach Theater's recent sexy treatment of Tamburlaine scribe Christopher Marlowe has heightened our expectations — how could a figure with such a dashing, myth-heavy past produce such a lumbering, monotonous work? Unfortunately, even the author's more lyrical moments can't hold our attention for this three hour-plus extravaganza.......

>> The Shakespeare Theatre Company has started a special program, called 20/10, that offers people aged 35 and under discounted tickets for their performances. The program launches tonight, with a special performance of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine where all of the tickets will be $10 for the under 35 crowd, and they're promising a DJ, drink specials and door prizes for those who take advantage. Call the box office at (202) 547-1122 for details. >>......

You’ve gotta love a man who can make the “All The World’s A Stage” monologue not sound like something you’ve heard 80 zillion times before. That man is Joseph Marcell (best known as Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), offering the most nuanced of performances in the generally strong cast of Folger Theater’s As You Like It. Granted, his Jacques is one of the more interesting roles in a Shakespeare work that has its......

Pitiable...arresting...bad-ass...shrew? Charlayne Woodard's portrayal of the infamous Kate in Shakespeare Theatre's The Taming of the Shrew defies one-word description. She's an integral part of what's so appealing about Rebecca Bayla Taichman's take on the show, a production which almost manages to overcome the sexist undercurrents of the work itself. For those who missed English class that day (or have never seen Kiss Me Kate, or Ten Things I Hate About You, or that "Moonlighting" episode...),......

Last week, the National Gallery of Art opened a career retrospective of British landscape artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) -- the largest ever assembled in the United States. The curators of the show have assembled a collection that demonstrates Turner's development as an artist, as well as his commitment to raising the status of landscape art in a time when the classical themes pervaded Europe's artistic community. A must see for anyone with even......

While no major event on the schedule this week trumps all others, there are several concerts that will merit your attention. Three of them are scheduled for Thursday night. If contemporary music was the headliner last week, this week it is early music. >> Opera Lafayette's bread and butter is in presenting obscure Baroque operas, usually French, sung by exceptional voices and with the help of their fine instrumental ensemble. The group opens its season......

They’re baaaaack. The area’s theater companies, that is. September marks season opener time for quite a few groups around town. Here are some of the highlights: This weekend kicks things off with the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage festival. Get a free first look at some of the new plays premiering around town this season. Lots of stuff looks interesting -- a new take on Kafka's The Trial from Catalyst, Ken Ludwig's version of The......

Watching ex lovers bicker and slap each other silly may not sound like the most relaxing way to spend the evening, but Washington Shakespeare Company’s production of Noel Coward’s Private Lives makes for a surprisingly breezy, relaxing evening at the theater. Setting helps. WSC has chosen Playbill Café’s tiny black box theater to stage the work, and between lovely set pieces and the atmospheric addition of a singing chanteuse behind a lazy veil (Barbara Papendorp),......

>> Continuing their trend of showing only the weirdest awesome movies for free in this city, the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater will actually screen an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 tonight as part of their Screening Shakespeare series. Really. It's the episode of MST3K where the crew is forced to watch a laughably bad German made-for-TV adaptation of Hamlet -- as the press release rightly notes, "is that Ricardo Montalban as......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Repertory: Labyrinth Jim Henson continued to indulge the darker doors of his mind that he'd thrown wide open with The Dark Crystal in this, regrettably his last feature film. How a film made by Jim Henson and George Lucas, and starring David Bowie managed to tank as badly as this did upon release is a mystery,......

>> We're probably never gonna get a full-blown Fugazi reunion at Fort Reno, but tonight is the closest you could ask for. Tonight's show includes Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina's band The Evens along with Joe Lally. 7:15 p.m., always free. >> Bouncing Ball Theatrical Productions opens their second summer season with a benefit production of Titus, the musical, a punk rock musical adaptation of Shakespeare's play with a similar name, at the Black......

There’s a great Canadian TV show called Slings and Arrows about the backstage sound and fury at a fictitious Shakespeare company. In one memorable episode, the director of a troubled production of MacBeth — and theatrical superstition holds that there can be no other kind — tries to turn things around by making the blowhard actor he’s been forced to cast in the title role perform his first scene with Lady MacBeth in the......

>> Fort Reno continues tonight with LeJeune, Pup Tent and Engine Room. There's a bit of a chance of isolated showers this afternoon and evening, but nothing that should prevent the free concert from going on around 7:15. >> There's a stand-up comedy benefit show tonight starring Seattle comic Yoram Bauman --"the world's first and only stand-up economist" -- and four local comics: Tyler Richardson, Aparna Nancherla, Jason Weems, and Erin Jackson. Shows at......

Rogue and peasant slave? Try petulant teenager. Jeffrey Carlson’s take on the title character of Shakespeare Theater’s production of Hamlet, is much more a pouting, stubborn young man rather than a noble, conflicted individual. At first, Carlson’s Hamlet seems a bit affected. He's constantly sniffing, as if a coke addict, and it seems for awhile that his steady whining will be too much to handle for the entirety of a three-hour production. But his portrayal......

>> There's a lot going on tonight in our Weekly Music Agenda, but we'd especially recommend making the trip to Iota for Exit Clov's show with The Eames Era, who play easily digestible indie-pop without being annoying about it. Also The Beanstalk Library. 8:30 p.m. $10. >> Tickets are still available to see Skinny Puppy at the 9:30 Club tonight. It could be just like when you used to hang out with your older......

>> Plácido Domingo conducts the orchestra and selected singers of the Washington National Opera in a special concert performance in the Music Center at Strathmore. A few tickets in the orchestra section remain at the box office, if you are looking for a last-minute luxury date. $68, 8 p.m. >> Time is running out to catch this year's Shakespeare Free For All, Love's Labor's Lost, at the Carter Barron Amphitheater. The final performance is......

It's a weird month when you've got no Broadway tours hitting Warner or National, but still can easily fit in four musicals. And if you're not a song and dance man (or woman), there's always three versions of Hamlet to choose from. Welcome to June in D.C. theater! Here are the highlights: About those musicals: Lloyd Webber descends upon D.C., with Kennedy Center staging The Phantom of the Opera (June 20) and Wolf Trap hosting......

I skipped the season finale of Lost the other night in favor of another supernatural tale of attractive people haunted by their pasts who just want to get off the damn island. The Folger’s latest staging of The Tempest is a light, spritely, fleet-footed thing of a play, apropos for a show about forgiveness and renewal and the casting off of old follies. Like the shipwreck that opens Act I, it’s forceful and bewildering and......

Heck yeah, Washington! It's the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend, and we sure hope you're leaving early today. Whether you're staying in town to enjoy a little extra breathing room or escaping via bus, train, car or plane, we'd like to wish you a wonderful and safe weekend. If you're like me, you're driving out to the beach despite surging gas prices -- but according to the WaPo, we're not alone. According to AAA Mid-Atlantic,......

Last night, as part of Shakespeare in Washington, the Kennedy Center staged Such Sweet Thunder — a performance that combined the words of Shakespeare and the music of Washington's son, Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington. The show combined musical, theatrical, dance, and narrative elements, all inspired by Shakespeare's work, to create a unique event. While the singularity and the quality of many of the performers made for an enjoyable night, the whole was less than the......

Summer is almost here, and that means it is almost time to roll up the carpets and send the Classical Music Agenda on vacation. So enjoy the music while you can. In particular, this is the last week to take in a performance of the best production from Washington National Opera this season, Janáček's Jenůfa. My review called this opera "essential viewing for anyone who cares about music drama." Performances remain only on Monday (May......