Each month DCist will offer a few theater reviews from around the region and give you our critics’ verdict: whether you should see them, skip them, or at least think about it. Want to know what else is playing? Check out our monthly theater preview.

Six
Review by Peter Tabakis

Six is a history lesson presented as a contemporary pop extravaganza, one that shines a spotlight on the women once wedded to Henry VIII. The enthusiasm surrounding the show, five years after its debut at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, remains palpable. I’ve seen the current touring company, now belting out anthems at the National Theatre, twice in a single week (unplanned, to be clear). Both times an audience, peppered with blissful tweens and confused season-ticket holders, became uniformly rapturous by curtain call.

That sense of joy can be infectious. Six – written by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, co-directed by Moss and Jamie Armitage – is a performance cheekily delivered “live in consort.” The production mixes Hedwig and the Angry Inch’s faux concert format with Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango” confessionals. Our fabulous queens – Catherine of Aragon (Khaila Wilcoxon), Anne Boleyn (Storm Lever), Jane Seymour (Jasmine Forsberg), Anne of Cleves (Olivia Donaldson), Katherine Howard (Didi Romero), and Catherine Parr (Gabriela Carrillo) – have harrowing stories to tell, even if they include slangy lyrics (“you’re gonna find out how he got unfriended”) that already feel dated. Each woman gets a show-stopping number that channels other notable queens: Beyoncé, Adele, Britney and Rhianna among them.

Six is proudly maximalist. The spectacle could easily register in nearby Capital One Arena’s nosebleed seats, from Gabriella Slade’s glittery, hybrid Tudor-futuristic costumes; Carrie-Anne Ingrouille’s bouncy choreography; and Emma Bailey and Tim Deiling’s electric combo of scenic and lighting design. In an intimate space like the Broadway-designed National Theatre, this booming tribute to girl power – which includes four badass women musicians in the onstage band — is all the more visceral and, consequently, loud. (A pair of earplugs may be required, depending on your disposition, to at least dampen the ecstatic reactions of legions of pre-pubescent audience members.)

During “Ex-Wives,” Six’s standout opening tune, the queens are reduced to a fate (directly or indirectly) attributed to a shared husband: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. But this is mere misdirection. By the end of an 80-minute celebration, six legends have fully reclaimed and rewritten their legacies.

Verdict: See

Six plays until September 4 at the National Theatre. Tickets range from $65 to $150, with a digital lottery available the day before the designated performance(s). Runtime is 80 minutes with no intermission.

tick, tick,… BOOM!
Review by Nicole Hertvik

In 1996, Rent made waves on Broadway, earning composer Jonathan Larson a Pulitzer Prize and three Tony Awards and changing the landscape of musical theater. But in a sad twist of fate, Larson didn’t live to see the success of his now iconic work. He died of an undiagnosed heart condition on the morning of Rent’s first Off-Broadway performance.

Written years before Rent, Larson’s tick, tick… BOOM! did not enjoy the same immediate popularity. It is, by all accounts, a “starter” musical that took on added poignancy in the wake of Larson’s passing. An autobiographical account of Larson’s early adulthood, tick, tick… BOOM! tells the story of Jon, a struggling musical theater artist wondering if he will ever find success writing musicals as his 30th birthday looms.

Monumental Theater Company’s immersive production of tick, tick… BOOM! harnesses the intimate, confessional nature of the show.

Director Michael Windsor’s production breaks the wall between cast and audience. The set (scenic design by Windsor and Yaritza Pacheco) feels like a living room, with couches placed jauntily around coffee tables lit with soft candles. Audience members sit on these set pieces while the actors weave among them, sometimes perching on a sofa with you, sometimes jumping on the coffee table in front of you. It is cleverly constructed immersive theater, but introverts be warned: there is no hiding in this show.

Christian Montgomery plays Jon, the autobiographical Larson, with frank intimacy. Alex De Bard plays Jon’s girlfriend Susan and a myriad of character roles that showcase her acting abilities nicely. (Both Montgomery and De Bard are fresh off successful performances in Olney’s A.D. 16 and anyone who saw them in that show will appreciate this opportunity to hear their clear vocals in such an intimate setting.)

A four-piece rock band accompanies the show onstage conducted by the fabulous Marika Countouris, who plays a mean keyboard.

Monumental’s tick, tick… BOOM! Is a great opportunity to see some of D.C.’s most talented young artists revisit the early work of one of musical theater’s most influential composers.

Verdict: See

Tick, tick… BOOM! From Monumental Theater Company plays at the Ainslie Arts Center on the campus of Episcopal High School in Alexandria through July 31. Tickets are $65. Run time is 90 minutes with no intermission.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Review by Lori McCue

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the Shakespeare play with two couples who wander into the woods and spend a night in a dreamlike state, preyed upon with love potion by a meddling fairy queen.

Now that that’s out of the way, we can get to the real point of this review: How exactly does it work to stage a whole Folger Theatre production inside a museum exhibit? Specifically, inside The Playhouse, the latest blockbuster summer exhibition at the National Building Museum, which transforms the museum’s great hall into a Shakespearean theater. The production — directed by Victor Malana Maog — has already made some on-the-fly changes: Curtain time on press night was pushed back by an hour, because the sun streaming in from the museum’s windows was making the show’s lighting design moot.

The transformation of the vast museum into a colorful fairyland is an appropriate backdrop for Midsummer, a story about magic, hallucinations, and — in one subplot — actually putting on a play. In addition to the show’s quarreling Athenian lovers (played by Bryan Barbarin, Renea S. Brown, Lilli Hokama, and Hunter Ringsmith), who sprint, dance, and literally tackle each other all over the stage, a cast of hilarious actors is rehearsing a play to perform for the king and queen. The play’s star, Bottom (scene-stealer Jacob Ming-Trent), meanwhile, gets caught up in a series of tricks played on him by the mischievous Puck (Danaya Esperanza) and the queen of the fairies (Nubia M. Monks). Through it all, glittering costumes, twinkling lights, and impressive stagecraft tricks keep the world feeling magical. (Though the production hasn’t managed to contend with the less-than-ideal acoustics in the cavernous museum hall.)

The region has no shortage of Midsummers this summer: Synetic Theater and The Arlington Players both staged the Bard’s work this season, too. But this museum-set production is perhaps the only one whose fairy world isn’t just on the stage, but envelops the audience as soon as they walk through the front door.

Verdict: See

A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs at the National Building Museum through Aug. 28; tickets $20-$85. Runtime 90 minutes with no intermission.