The team maintained the film’s Calypso-inspired soundtrack, but made a few changes, including a beefed-up role for Lydia.
The toothsome siblings are back with a touring holiday version of their Vegas variety show.
In West Side Story at the National Theater, a bilingual production is hardly a language barrier. In fact, the directorial choice of Arthur Laurents to set some of the dialogue and a number of the musical numbers performed by the Sharks (the Puerto Rican contingent of the two warring gangs) and their women in Spanish, is easily the most innovative and powerful aspect of this Broadway-bound production. The show is getting an early debut…
Forget Christmas shopping, paying your bills, reading articulate reviews on your favorite local blog. The Internet is for porn. Such is one of the life lessons the delightful Avenue Q, now playing at the National Theater, provides. The now-famous show is a Sesame Street for the post-college, ennui-ridden 20 or 30-something. This means it teaches us not to spell and know our colors, but instead how to cope with useless liberal arts degrees, commitment-phobic boyfriends…
It’s November, so most minds are on turkey and stuffing, but two theater companies are getting a jump on Christmas festivities. While we won’t see Ford Theater’s annual production of A Christmas Carol until December, both Arena Stage and Synetic Theater have their own take on the classic. Arena’s Christmas Carol 1941 emphasizes the DC Christmas experience (Nov 16), while Synetic’s promises to be more choreography-driven (Nov. 24). The relatively new company Spooky Action Theater…
It’s hard to believe that a musical could get you hooked on phonics. But spelling suddenly becomes irresistible in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” the touring production of the Broadway hit, now playing at the National Theater. The pleasing, goofy show takes an amalgam of precocious, oddball kids and makes you root for them all. There are archetypes for sure — the obsessive Asian kid, the nasal, self-important geek — but each one…
When watching Cherry Jones transform herself into the meaty role of Sister Aloysius in John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer prize winning Doubt, one can’t help but have that rare, wonderful feeling that they’re the witness to something amazing. Jones won a Tony for her chameleon-like performance and it’s clear she’s lost no steam reprising the role for the stage at the National Theater. And what a role it is. Sister Aloysius, the principal at a Catholic…
Hot Feet, the new musical with songs old and new by Earth, Wind & Fire making its world premiere at the National Theater, inevitably will be compared to its juke-box-soundtrack predecessors, from the Billy Joel-driven Movin’ Out to the Beach Boys bash Good Vibrations. And while those shows are frequently derided by the theater-snob community, Hot Feet’s curse is that it may not even connect with mainstream audiences: it lacks the guilty-pleasure infectuousness of a…
FRIDAY: We like to think of Dame Edna as a sort of old-school Eddie Izzard, with only slightly worse eye shadow. The “glittering gigastar” is performing Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance at the National Theater this weekend, and the title is probably somewhat telling — it sounds a bit like a last hurrah to us. Still, how many chances in life does one really have to be verbally abused and assaulted with gladiolus by…
February’s theater scene brings a month of insomnia and exorcisms, dames and deaths. But before we outline the month’s offerings, allow us to say thanks to DCist reader Jeffrey, who reminded us that tickets for the Monty Python spectacular, Spamalot, coming to the National Theater in June, go on sale Februrary 26. They’ll be gone faster than you can say “shrubbery,” so mark your calendars. In the meantime, how far would you go to protect…
