While its spectacle sometimes doesn’t leave it room to breathe, the elements bring to life the mysticism at the heart of the play.

It’s hard to imagine a better production than this.

>> Black Cat plays host to Oakland’s Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, who’ll be pounding out their avant-rock on a few homemade instruments while performing puppet shows and giving pseudo-scientific scholarly presentations. What’s not to like? Stinking Lizaveta, an intense experimental trio from Philly, will kick things off. $12, 8 p.m. >> Tonight is your last chance to stop by the Smithsonian American Art Museum to catch their lecture series on The Media Arts: A History….

I skipped the season finale of Lost the other night in favor of another supernatural tale of attractive people haunted by their pasts who just want to get off the damn island. The Folger’s latest staging of The Tempest is a light, spritely, fleet-footed thing of a play, apropos for a show about forgiveness and renewal and the casting off of old follies. Like the shipwreck that opens Act I, it’s forceful and bewildering and…

It’s summertime (well, springtime anyway) and the living’s easy…if you’re a Shakespeare fan. Theaters in the area have traditionally offered free Bard fare during the year’s warmer months, and with the Shakespeare in Washington Festival drawing to a close at the end of June, Will aficionados have even more options. Here are the highlights: Shakespeare Theater’s Free For All is always one of the more anticipated theater events of the year. From May 24 through…

Editorial Disclosure: DCist contributor Jason Linkins has a supporting role in this production Take a little Neil Gaiman, add a healthy dose of Jasper Fforde, infuse with a serious shot of Shakespeare and pepper with clever literary references throughout (and a refreshing amount of silliness), and you have Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Rough Magic, now being showcased by Rorschach Theater as part of the Shakespeare in Washington festival. As a festival entry, this one’s a smart pick…

Valentine’s Day is approaching, which means it’s a time of passion….the Passion of the Crawford, that is.Yes, the drag sensation Lypsinka’s ode to the famed movie star, opening at Studio Theater Feb. 7, may be the closest thing D.C. theater has to Valentine’s themed content this month. Well, Arena’s doing Frankie and Johnny at the Clair de Lune, a story of lonely, middle-aged people coming together (Feb. 23)…and that’s about it. We may be a…

It’s official: we’re going to have no social life this January, as there are too many great productions premiering this month for us to do anything else but plays, plays, plays. We’ve got a ridiculous amount of Shakespeare, a beloved Sondheim musical, a new work by an old favorite, and we haven’t even gotten to Kathleen Turner. It’s a good month to be a theater lover. We adore Neil LaBute here at DCist, even though…

In last week’s Classical Music Agenda, I led with a concert on Sunday afternoon in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s acoustically splendid auditorium. It was the first concert of the season from the Contemporary Music Forum, but not even the Washington premiere of a major piece of new music, Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, could draw more than a sparse audience. The composer himself was on hand to give a brief presentation on Tempest Fantasy, which…

Sexual intrigue, Hellen Keller and urine; that’s what area theaters have to offer us during the slow month of August, the dead time between the close of the ’04/’05 season and the beginning of the new one. In all seriousness, August still has plenty of offerings for D.C. theatergoers, as a bunch of well-received shows take final bows and a few exciting new productions make their debuts. People can’t stop tinkering with Les Liasons…