26 stories by "Andrew Lapin"
Sure, this lush, blistering riff on pop stardom " and the many ways it intersects with a culture obsessed with both violence and celebrity " is over-the-top. That's the point.
The 10th annual Capital Fringe festival is ramping up, and City Paper's Fringeworthy blog (formerly Fringe & Purge) is looking for fresh blood. Want to see the shows for free, sound off …
Joss Whedon, a man whose name is synonymous with some of the most feverishly obsessed-over fantasy and science-fiction franchises of the last 20 years, is also a hardcore Shakespeare fan. In…
Movies arriving from overseas are the bread and butter of Filmfest DC, the annual tour of cinematic works Washingtonians would otherwise have little chance to see. The French drama "In the H…
Normally the Academy Award nominations are an annual opportunity for film fans to gripe about how out-of-touch the Hollywood establishment is with quality filmmaking. But something strange h…
Can you feel that white-hot bubbling of Conservatism in your gut? Can you smell that unmistakable, pungent aroma of angry men? It's David Mamet season in Washington, and the air is thick wit…
At one point late in “Bachelorette,” Kirsten Dunst's fiery yet weak-kneed creation inadvertently reveals an ugly old habit of hers to a near-total stranger. "I wanted to be beaut…
The modern jukebox musical is here to stay. Broadway purists can either fight this continued re-appropriation of fizzy, carbonated songs and their respective eras like some kind of theatre p…
Comedian Bill Hicks had a famous routine about people who work in marketing and advertising. Well, maybe "routine" isn't the right word: Hicks would stand on stage, address the marketers in …
Whatever there is to say about The Ice Child (and there's a fair amount to say), no one can claim the play is spinning its wheels. To realize the tale of a girl captured and imprisoned in a …
The Academy Awards are almost upon us once again, and this Sunday night, the entire film industry will hold its breath while a bunch of old, white men tell us what they liked this year. Here…
Peter Pan always did seem like a rather difficult creature, as far as immortals go. Anyone with such a steadfast refusal to mature or learn anything useful can't be entirely pleasant to be a…
A faith compromised is an odd beast indeed. Take Luke, the young, beguiling object of affection in Round House Theatre's new production of Geoffrey Nauffts' Tony-nominated Next Fall, as perf…
One of the few concrete tidbits we learn about German dance choreographer Pina Bausch over the course of the new 3-D documentary "Pina" is that she was a woman of few words. As should rightf…
Glenn Close doesn't play Albert Nobbs as a woman passing for a man " she plays the character as sexless. The straight-laced member of the waitstaff at Dublin's Morrison Hotel keeps a telling…
When Sarah, the ambitious, chain-smoking photojournalist at the heart of Time Stands Still, returns from assignment in Iraq, she's broken and battered. Her face and neck are scarred; her leg…
The London stage version won 2 Olivier Awards; it picked up 6 Tony Awards in New York. But will you like the movie? "War Horse" finds director Steven Spielberg melding together the two genre…
It's one of history's greatest ironies: The pioneering psychologists, those men and women who first stepped foot onto the vast expanses of our subconscious minds, were themselves not exactly…
Those who think of Chicago-based improv troupe The Second City as nothing but overpriced comedy workshops and "Saturday Night Live" auditions will be in for a strange awakening when they wal…
"West Side Story" is the safe musical, the one grasped easily enough by young (but not too young) audiences that it's become one of the de facto introductions to theater. Of course, it helps…
There's one crucial component of film stars that separates them from theater actors: eternal preservation, the simple fact that a winking, luminous Marilyn Monroe in her white dress in 1954'…
Making the most of a Muppet When Kevin Clash plays Elmo, his face takes on an otherworldly demeanor as his arms manipulate the furry red monster. You can see his eyes drift off like they're …
Success stories in the theater world, like in music, film and every other form of art, are predicated first and foremost on one thing: circumstance. All of Rodger's or Hammerstein's talent a…
Few films occupy as strange a corner of the cinematic landscape as Charles Laughton's 1955 classic "The Night Of  The Hunter." A nightmarish mix of American folklore and German expression…
Walls, obstructions and the various ways they can be defiled are the subjects of We Fight We Die, a new play presented from Junesong Arts that dives into the moral dilemmas of those who make…
