At the outset, I will confess a bias: I much prefer listening to baroque pieces played in the style, and on the scale, of the time in which they were composed. Handel's 1741 oratorio Messiah…
The character arc that carries Lerner and Loewe's classic My Fair Lady belongs to Eliza Doolittle, as she rises from flower girl at Covent Garden to the belle of the embassy ball, from feral…
Based on a renowned short story by James Joyce, The Dead, now being presented by Scena Theatre, is a slice of the lives of polite, quiet desperation lived by genteel middle-class Dubliners i…
In Samoa, 68 people " mostly children " have died of measles in recent weeks, victims of an abysmally low immunization rate resulting, in significant part, from misinformation spread on soci…
Hector Berlioz's mid-19th-century L'Enfance du Christ is not quite an oratorio in the most familiar sense of that term. Nor is it quite an opera. Written piecemeal over many years by a compo…
"Curious" is the operative word in the title of Simon Stephens' The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, now playing at the Round House Theatre. The protagonist, teenager Christoph…
Venus Theatre's staff don't open the house until immediately before The Powers that Be begins, presenting audience members, as they take their seats, with the evening's most arresting image,…
Virginia Opera's artistic director Adam Turner, in his program note for contemporary composer Daniel Catán's Il Postino, hastens to assure audiences that the company is working to dispel …
I've never been to Reading, PA, the location of Lynn Nottage's searing 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Sweat, now playing at Silver Spring Stage, but my life has been bracketed by living i…
Canadian playwright Norman Yeung's Theory, in its American premiere at Mosaic Theater, seeks to be, in the words of Mosaic's press release, "a hot button play for our digital moment." Yeung …
Getting killed multiple times in a single production can be great fun (my personal best is three). In Reston Community Players' (RCP) A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, Patrick Graham "…
How do you put a human face on a difficult, complex subject the natural habitat of which may more likely be a law review article than a stage? Such is playwright Sharyn Rothstein's task in R…
From its beginnings as a very low-budget 1960 Roger Corman B-picture horror flick (a young Jack Nicholson had a minor role), Little Shop of Horrors has been an irresistible salad of corrupte…
Snow White is bossy. Cinderella is a ditzy dim bulb. Sleeping Beauty not only sleeps a lot but snores. Belle is going nuts from talking to inanimate objects. Mulan likes girls. Â Just wha…
Black early 20th-century celebrity heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson has had as irresistible a pull on subsequent playwrights and filmmakers as he did on the public of his day. Alr…
Ambiguous loss that binds two people together while pushing them apart. Incompatible paths of grief that alienate each other's only source of connection. The dominating presence of someone w…
Andrew Lloyd Webber catapulted to unprecedented West End and Broadway success with his musical extravaganza Cats, based on a 1939 collection of light verse by the otherwise modernist poet, T…
After a highly successful animated film, a long-running Broadway show, a live-action movie version, various spin-offs, and innumerable theme park, cruise ship, and school productions, the Di…
The central character in Best Medicine Rep's (BMR) DC-area premiere of Cricket Daniel's Helen on Wheels, Helen Wheeler (Liz Weber), is a 74-year old Oklahoma widow full of vim, vigor, and st…
In this summer of our discontent " what with unchecked climate change, racist politics, and mass murders " a bit of cheer in the form of a frothy tale of a privileged white girl who, through…
Baltimore Shakespeare Factory's (BSF) production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, directed by Tom Delise, delivers the "merry" promised in the title. The wives " Alice Ford (Emily Classen) and…
The American interior West has long been a favored setting for stories about loneliness. The visual emptiness of vast open spaces " think of your favorite John Ford film " and the emotional …
Playwright Sam Hamashima is described in his program bio as working in the "collision between his queer identity and his Japanese-American identity." In American Spies and Other Homegrow…
Eat your heart out, Christmas Carol. Hang up your dancing shoes, Nutcracker. Change the channel on reruns of It's a Wonderful Life. It's Christmas in July in Shepherdstown, as the Contempora…
The Antonio in question is Antonio Edwards Suarez, the writer (with Dael Orlandersmith) and actor in this one-man autobiographical piece, part of the Contemporary American Theater Festival i…