Openings are limited in August as theaters get ready for their fall season. But there are still options for those desperate to see a new show in the sweltering heat.
Sondheim’s A Little Night Music opens at Signature on August 15
OPENING THIS MONTH
Keegan stages Big Fish, a musical adaptation of the Tim Burton film (August 5).
Longacre Lea’s annual production is the Shakespeare mashup Whipping, or the Football Hamlet (August 10).
The off-Broadway musical The Devil’s Music: The Life and Blues of Bessie Smith, about the legendary singer, moves to Mosaic (August 24).
MetroStage’s one-man show The Wizard of Hip follows an African-American Everyman in search of what is hip. (August 17).
Sondheim’s melancholy farce A Little Night Music gets the Signature treatment (August 15).
Since 1991, the Shakespeare Theatre Company has put on a free summer show. For its 27th annual Free For All, the theater is bringing back its popular 2016 production of Othello (August 15). Learn how to get free tickets and apply for the online lottery here.
Jon Peterson as the Emcee and the 2017 National Touring cast of Roundabout Theatre Company’s CABARET, closing at the Kennedy Center August 6. (Joan Marcus)
STILL PLAYING
With its dramatization of the life of Billie Holiday, Lady Day still graces the Anacostia Playhouse with her presence until August 6.
The remount of the Scalia-focused The Originalist ends its Arena run August 6. We found its 2015 production a “a smart, thrilling trip through Supreme Court history.”
Imagination Stage’s rock and roll take on Alice in Wonderland wraps up August 13.
Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I closes at the Kennedy Center August 20. We wrote that although “its source material clashes—at times marginally, other times starkly—with modern sensibilities,” such famous songs as “i Whistle A Happy Tune” and “Hello Young Lovers,” help make this production “feel so alive.”
Also at the Kennedy Center, Cabaret closes August 6. Our reviewer, who has seen several revived productions of this chestnut, writes that, “this is the finest cast of Cabaret I’ve encountered.” and that, ” in it we can see the complacent class and nationalistic president of our current moment.”
Enjoy more Rodgers & Hammerstein in A Grand Night for Singing at Next Stop until August 20.
Wig Out, which provides a glimpse of an underground LGBTQ performance scene with roots in 1930s Harlem, glams up Studio until August 20. We wrote that it’s ” to the best strutting D.C. has seen since the annual High Heel Race.”
Synetic’s The Mark of Cain, which the company calls, “a neo-surrealist distillation of human history,” continues its eerie run through August 13.
Olney also has two productions ending in August: Thurgood (about the late Chief Justice) runs through August 20, while My Fair Lady closes August 6.
Quotidian Theater’s production of Night Seasons, Horton Foote’s play about about an elderly woman who feels her age is a punishment, closes August 13.
Unexpected Stage stages Oblivion, in which the teenage daughter of a secular couple decides to become a Christian, through August 6.
Woolly’s return staging of An Octoroon ends August 6. “In one second you’re going to be laughing so hard you almost pee on yourself, and then the next moment your heart kind of gets ripped out from underneath you. And then you find yourself laughing again,” actor Jon Hudson Odom told us last year.
LOOKING AHEAD
September brings The Wild Party to Constellation, Death of a Salesman to Ford’s, Neverwhere to Rorschach, and more.
