There were so many new shows around the D.C. theater scene in February that we couldn’t fit all our review into one post. But don’t worry — both shows featured here are running well into March. Want to see what else is playing? Check out our monthly theater preview.
Kinky Boots
Review by Nicole Hertvik
“Red is the color of sex,” Solomon Parker III croons halfway through Kinky Boots. Parker plays Lola, a fierce and fearless drag queen with a talent for designing boots for fellow performers. Parker’s career-defining performance — full of sass, confidence and pathos — is the centerpiece of the red-hot production now playing at Olney Theater Center.
Kinky Boots recounts the real-life effort to save a family-owned shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England. In the stage version, featuring songs by Cindy Lauper and book by Harvey Fierstein, a chance encounter between Lola and Charlie, a straight-laced shoe factory owner, leads to a feel-good musical celebration of life that saves factory jobs and opens closed minds. (Presumably there was less singing and dancing in the real thing.)
That Charlie and Lola — individuals with seemingly nothing in common — grow to love and respect each other is the driving message behind Kinky Boots. In director Jason Loewith’s spirited production, we are reminded through rollicking dance numbers and pulsing beats that accepting people for who they are will make the world a better place.
Vincent Kempski’s Charlie is the other standout performance in Loewith’s production. Kempski’s throaty vocals and good natured bon-homie compliment Parker’s Lola and we never doubt the true affection between the two. Less convincing is the budding relationship between Kempski and the talented but miscast Alex De Bard as Lauren, Charlie’s budding love interest.
Costume designer Kendra Rai must have worked overtime on Lola’s gorgeous dresses, and Tara Jeanne Vallee’s choreography used every inch of the Olney performance space, transporting factory workers and Lola’s backup dancers from the factory floor to neighborhood pubs to a runway in Milan. (Credit also goes to nimble scenic design by Milagros Ponce de León.)
Seeing the show the same week that Proud Boys became violent while protesting a Drag Queen Story Hour at Silver Spring’s Loyalty Books was a reminder that while Kinky Boots is a nonstop dance party, it also offers a lesson in compassion. Lola’s challenge to one particularly obdurate factory worker becomes a challenge to all of us: Accept someone for who they are.
Kinky Boots runs at Olney Theatre Center through March 26. Tickets are $42-95. Run time is approximately two and a half hours with one 15-minute intermission.
Incognito
Review by Missy Frederick
It’s hard not to be intrigued by the story of a dude who walked off with a brain and put it in his trunk.
It can take some time (and be a little frustrating) to figure out exactly how the three stories and 20 characters (embodied by four performers) in Constellation Theatre Company’s Incognito fit together. But it’s the brain (think in the abstract, not one particular organ) that thematically, if somewhat tenuously, links the individuals in Nick Payne’s play.
The one with that actual brain in his trunk is Thomas Stoltz Harvey (Marcus Kyd), and you may have heard of him: he’s the pathologist who, in an incredible true story, basically stole Albert Einstein’s brain after doing his autopsy, allegedly in the name of science — a decision that ultimately leads to an obsession. It’s a premise meaty enough for a play on its own, but Payne also combines it with the tale of a midlife neuroscientist (Kari Ginsburg) aiming to start her romantic life over again, and the heartbreaking victim of seizure-induced amnesia (Gerrad Alex Taylor) who can only remember for seconds at a time, to the despair of his steadfast fiance (Ixchel Hernandez).
The quartet of actors assembled by director Allison Arkell Stockman for Incognito are a capable bunch, though (ostensibly in the name of creating some mystery) it can be confusing to follow who we’re watching (rapidly changing, pronounced accents almost feel like a cheat sheet to try to help us differentiate). It takes a surprisingly long time, for example, to place exactly why we just witnessed a strangulation scene between two unintroduced characters.
But Taylor and Hernandez in particular are a gut-wrenching pair as the star-crossed couple hindered by that tragic illness: their love for each other and Hernandez’s anguished compassion for her partner are the palpable heart of Incognito.
Incognito runs through March 12 at Constellation Theatre Company; running time is approximately 90 minutes without an intermission. Tickets ($20-$55) are available online.
