Five Subway restaurants, a Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut in D.C. were shut down over an allegedly unpaid tax bill.

It’s sometimes poetic. It’s sometimes haunting. It’s consistently, well, long. A hard sell, ’tis, this Portia Coughlin. Marina Carr ‘s allusive, surreal, and ultimately turgid play gets its D.C. premiere in a confused and confusing production by Solas Nua, the great theater company dedicated to works by living Irish dramatists. The show certainly doesn’t lack for ambition, but it’s somehow both overcooked and undernourished, boasting several fine performances but ultimately sunk by a muddled narrative,…

Man, I had the craziest hallucination last night. Thing is, about 2,000 other people had it, too, and to give due credit, it wasn’t really my hallucination. It was Yukio Ninagawa’s. The multi-Olivier-award winning director, who picked up a knighthood from Her Majesty’s Government in 2002 for his bold reinterpretations of the likes of Twelfth Night and Medea (making him, um, Sir Yukio, we guess), has brought his Shintoku-Maru to the Kennedy Center for a…