You’ve gotta love a man who can make the “All The World’s A Stage” monologue not sound like something you’ve heard 80 zillion times before. That man is Joseph Marcell (best known as Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), offering the most nuanced of performances in the generally strong cast of Folger Theater’s As You Like It. Granted, his Jacques is one of the more interesting roles in a Shakespeare work that has its…

We all know the full moon can be a beautiful sight at night, but have you ever thought of making the moon your dance partner? In Rorschach Theater’s lovely, lyrical production of Jose Rivera’s References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, the cripplingly lonely Gabriela (Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey) does that and more, coming perilously close to making the moon her lover while her Army husband Benito (Andrew Price) is away. It’s hard to blame her, when…

If you’re going to stage a free reading of Twelfth Night, having it January 6 to kick off the city’s “Shakespeare in Washington” festival counts as pretty good timing. Plus, it has Balki. The event will take place at the Kennedy Center’s Concert Hall at 6 p.m. tomorrow, and will star Bronson Pinchot, Veanne Cox, Jennifer Dundas, as well as a number of our favorite D.C. actors, like Will Gartshore, Scott McCormick and Regina Aquino….

If Hitler had been a gangster, what color tie would he have worn? To some, that inquisitive trajectory is irrelevant and even downright disrespectful. Hitler was not only obsessed by power and violence, but a monster to whom, most would say, we should never extend the benefit of a psycho-history. To Bertolt Brecht, however, the value of an inquiry into Hitler the gangster outweighed the dangers. Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (pictured), now…

There are those of us who fall into the category of people who believe that any movie or play with a swordfight is automatically worth watching. Even if you don’t fall into that category, Rorschach Theatre’s masterful production of Fair Ladies At A Game Of Poem Cards has plenty of other pleasures to offer. But those swordfights! Fair Ladies mostly revolves around the tale of two samurai who fall for some off-limits ladies-in-waiting to…

We’ve all sat around debating the age-old conundrum, “Did William Shakespeare really write all those plays?” All right, maybe that’s only the stuffy English grad students among us. Rorschach Theatre’s production of The Beard Of Avon offers its own answer to the heated question, but the results prove much more than an academic exercise — instead, it gives us a delightful romp through the lives of the usual suspects in the Shakespeare controversy, from Sir…

Was he a man who defied classification, or an individual who would pigeonhole future homosexuals into labels and constructions? Was he an early role model for the gay movement, or a man who denied his identity? And can art be held to moral standards? These questions all play a central role in Moisés Kaufman’s Gross Indecency: The Three Trials Of Oscar Wilde now being staged in a fresh production by Theater Alliance at the H…