Results tagged “theater>”

Lulu is bad news. Don't believe me? Just take a glance at the couch that resides immediately in front of front row, center, in Washington Shakespeare Company's production of this Nicholas Wright-penned mashed-up adaptation of two notorious Frank Wedekind plays. There you'll find the trail of broken hearts and broken bodies the seductress leaves in her wake, in the form of dead husbands — one per act of this bloody, bawdy play — forced to sit there and watch helplessly after she has heartlessly dispatched them.

Signature Theatre's production of demonstrates two things: that sometimes a hefty dose of an old-school musical is just what you need, and that even those old chestnuts can still have some surprises in store.

Round House Theatre's production of rises well above the realm of mom-daughter drama.

There’s a huge star at the center of the Sydney Theatre Company’s much-hyped, Liv Ullman-directed, wholly satisfying new staging of A Streetcar Named Desire, which sold out its Kennedy Center run before the curtain rose on the first preview. I speak, of course, of the dramatist Tennessee Williams.

When it comes to Woolly Mammoth's season-opening production of , sometimes you just have to run with it. Literally.

November's proving to be a month of classics in D.C. From , old favorites are showing up quite a bit on local stages. Here's what's playing around town.

Does director Timothy Douglas's choice to set Folger's production of Shakespeare's during the D.C. Caribbean Carnival feel arbitrary? Sure. Does it matter? Not entirely.

Despite its World War II period setting and the old-fashioned feel of its Broadway by way of the Catskills laughs, Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers feels remarkably of the moment. A father is driven to bankruptcy trying to take care of his dying wife. In tough economic times, he joins the war effort to get himself out of debt, leaving his two teenage sons in the care of his stern mother, who also has an adult child still living at home. It seems like a plausible early 21st century storyline. Except that today when we have to treat the catastrophic illnesses of uninsured loved ones, we end up owing more than we can pay to banks, instead of the loan sharks Simon's Eddie has to pay. OK, so maybe it's not that different.

There's a cliché out there that an opening number can make or break a show. Unfortunately, the first song in , now being staged by Studio Theatre, contributes to the "break" side of the equation.

After countless adaptations and revisions, what does the story of Dracula continue to bring to the table? Is it a cautionary tale? Case study of a haunting figure? An excuse for oozing sexuality? An almost comical villain at this point?

It's unlikely you've had a theater going experience in recent memory as uncomfortable as Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis. That might be a problem if it wasn't also likely one of the most rewarding. The play is the final one ever written by Kane, a British playwright who battled crippling depression for much of her short life, and committed suicide at the age of 28 after this work was completed.

October is here, so any companies still preparing to launch their fall seasons have pretty much done so. The result: lots of shows to choose from this month.

The Studio Theatre made an ambitious move when choosing to open their season with Harold Pinter's Moonlight. At the performance I attended, the house lights came up to hesitant, confused applause and the most common refrain among those leaving was a simple "I didn't get it." Pinter is not a playwright who readily lends himself to "getting"; his name is most closely associated with menace and the awkward, bizarre moments of humor that arise from such tension. (The Studio Theatre advertises the script's ambiguity and occasional incoherence as "poetic.")

Like an experiment exploring the limits of psychic pain, Jane Anderson's Quality of Life seems determined to pile tragedy upon tragedy to see just how much she can throw on the backs of her beleaguered characters before they cease bending and simply collapse into a pile of rubble.

I can't help thinking that Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray would have little interest in the character of the same name embodied by Roderick Hill in Round House's season opener, the world premiere of a new production of . Sure, this Gray's a slashing murderer, a sexual deviant and a good-looking-enough-guy (in a CW teen series kind of way). But yet, he still manages to be kind of boring.

There's not a lot of extra stuff binding together the songs that make up , Signature Theatre's extensive tribute to the music of Broadway greats Kander & Ebb. There's no thin plot driving the piece along; no real theme beyond the composers tying the songs together. Turns out, it's not really necessary. With the help of six stellar performers (and a spectacular orchestra), these songs stand on their own.

The Kennedy Center kicks off its fall season with its annual Open House Arts Festival, a highlight of its performance calendar. Every year, as part of its Performing Arts for Everyone initiative, the Center opens its doors to the public and folks can see cutting edge artists from around the world in nearly every performance space the venue has to offer. This Saturday marks the 25th installment of the festival, dubbed Stage & Street Spectacular. In recognition of that milestone, the event’s organizers took a step back to assess their approach.

In Washington Shakespeare Company's staging of the comedic drag classic , the story centers on Marguerite, a freewheeling but sickly prostitute with an assortment of silly friends, who falls in love with the penniless Armand. The cast is all male, save for one curious exception, and even actors who actually play men often join in with boa-wearing and lip-synching.

Title aside, turns out to be a lot more inspirational than it is salacious.

There's just something immensely satisfying about watching hot women kick some zombie ass.

August is notoriously the slowest month on the D.C. theater scene, and this year isn't an exception. But there's still a little Shakespeare, a little Mae West -- even a little bit of zombies to get you through the month.

Twisted. A twisted plot and twisted characters. Vile characters. Yale gender studies professor Darryl Lewis (Marisa Mickel) has been cheating on her husband, a less than successful academic, since before their 17 year old daughter Gwen (Natalia Emanuel) was born. Darryl's not so secret lover, Geoffrey Warshawski (Graham Stevens) is a renowned professor and longtime friend of the Lewises that shares her ultra leftist politics and arrives for the evening as a houseguest. But, as her cuckolded husband sleeps in their bedroom above, she doesn’t get any action from her libertine. That’s because G.W. is tired out from boning a fellow houseguest. So they fight instead. Then he beds the daughter. Who may actually be his. Did we mention this is a play about peace in the Middle East?

We know the Capital Fringe Festival can be overwhelming (and that our steady assault of reviews over the past few weeks can be, well, assaulting). So DCist's Fringe team decided to put together an easier to digest roundup of the shows we've reviewed so far as we enter into the final weekend of the festival.

Things weren't going so well for GL Mitchell, the hero of August Schulenburg's sharp, exceedingly odd and genuinely funny play, Riding the Bull, currently being presented by the Riot Actors of Washington as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. The unlikeliest of rodeo clowns, GL's a simple Catholic boy living in a small town in Texas who just wants his poor, crazy, Elvis-loving mother to be happy. But the guy doesn't really have a clue, and his penchant for the ladies of the Sears catalog have made him so randy he's actually lost his job and been ex-communicated from the Church. But everything starts to change when he hooks up with Lyza, the buxom town troublemaker. Thanks to some "magic" that seems to result from their oft-angry lovemaking, the two become wealthy overnight — and that's when it all predictably starts to go from bad to slightly better to much, much worse.

There's just something endearing about watching two earnest college a cappella groups vie to win the big competition, squabbling and smooching their way through school in the process.

Now here's some Christian rock we can get behind.

To be, or not to be. That is the . . . point?

Everyone has those favorite records that simply demand to be listened to from start to finish, where almost every song is fantastic, each one an individual slice of near perfection that works even better within the whole of the album. John Morogiello's Irish Authors Held Hostage is the dramatic equivalent.

Somewhere amid the lunacy of Hiawatha Lopez's Murth, there runs a thin thread of logic. Maybe logic is the wrong word. Coherence. No, it's not that, either. Sense? I'm having trouble here, because while the play does have a plot that, against all odds, does end up tying itself together in the end, the entire thing is an illogical, incoherent, nonsensical exercise in batty wordplay. Imagine Tom Stoppard had written the Airplane movies on a bad mescaline trip, and you're getting the image. Unfortunately, unlike the Stoppard-esque heights of linguistic gymnastics to which it aspires, all of the puns, repurposed figures of speech, and tongue-twisting dialog fall flat.

It’s Not Easy Being Green presents a pleasant series of sketches about sustainability. Over the course of little over an hour, Green finds the right balance of humor and environmental messaging.