86 stories by "John Bavoso"
The convening of people who may not have anything more in common with one another than shared DNA at holiday time can result in more misery than merriment for all involved. A funeral, too, c…
I walked into the DC Arts Center to catch The Book of Merman expecting a tale of half-men, half-fish, all-Mormon singers and dancers. What I found was even campier than that. Billed as "a de…
I had the entire introduction to this review written out in my head before I stepped foot in Studio Theatre to see the world premiere of Daniel Kitson's new solo show, A Short Series of Disa…
"Kids these days," or so I'm told, use “extra” as an adjective to denote that something is more than what is usual, expected, or necessary. As a noun, it means a person hired dai…
While sitting in DC Reynolds on Georgia Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, I learned a new drinking game. While this in and of itself might not be remarkable for a neighborhood bar during a holid…
"Torture numbers," author Gregg Easterbrook once wrote, "and they'll confess to anything." David S. Kessler, a masterful storyteller aided by onstage musicians and projections in his new sho…
At this point, there's an entire genre of books, TV shows, and films about bad bosses and the bizarre vagaries of corporate workplaces. One of the perhaps lesser-known but extremely effectiv…
The unofficial rules for crafting a successful play also tend to apply to compiling the perfect mixtape: tell a compelling story, know your audience but keep them guessing, set a tone, stick…
One barometer by which you can gauge the impact of a play is by whether it can be interpreted in wildly different ways by different audience members. Woolly Mammoth's production of Taylor…
Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s new rep of healthcare plays"Mercy Killers and Side Effects, both written and performed by Michael Milligan –Â tackle the broken nature of America…
"If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that," playwright Tom Stoppard once said. "But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral …
"Sometimes, a greater truth is revealed when the facts are fuzzy," says Rebecca Holiday (Natalie Cutcher) in the second act of Rorschach Theatre's production of Randy Baker's new play, Forgo…
"Is there anything more outrageous than an honest critic?" asks Karl Marx (Mary Myers) at one point during Nu Sass Productions' presentation of Howard Zinn's 1999 one-person show, Marx in So…
Science is real"and really dramatic"at the Edlavitch DCJCC, the home to Theater J's latest production, The How and the Why. Written by acclaimed writer and producer Sarah Treem, whose credit…
History, they say, is written by the victors, which may be one reason why Euripides's The Trojan Women is such a striking piece. By focusing on the women of Troy in the time between the fall…
If you've never seen"or even heard of"Shakespeare's Cymbeline, you're in good company. One of the Bard's least-produced works, the synopsis of the play's plot would take up at least the leng…
Full disclosure: The synopsis for Cats Onstage!'s debut show, SpookyMsgPlsFWD!, mentioned unicorns, so I was already highly predisposed to liking it. Unfortunately, not even the presence of …
If you're the kind of person who rolls your eyes when you hear about an author in his or her mid-twenties receiving a lofty sum to write a memoir, you may initially be suspicious of t…
Four dancers, a cellist, and a pianist walk into the Sprenger Theater at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. What's the punch line? Probably not what you'd expect. Or at least not what I was e…
"Remember the nurses." That's a sentence from the last paragraph"more like a footnote, really"from a Baltimore Sun article written in 1917 about the first group of American doctors an…
Heat indexes and the sheer quantity of shows aside, the numbers associated with Capital Fringe are generally kept deliberately small: budgets, cast sizes, tech hours, etc. So, it's a fitting…
Within its purple and yellow beanbag-strewn office overlooking Meridian Hill Park, the small but energetic staff of Young Playwrights' Theater (YPT) has been finalizing plans for its biggest…
Angst. Jealousy. Introspection. Betrayal. These are all emotions that could potentially arise when two cohabitating best friends interview for the same job and only one gets it. Unfortunatel…
As you enter Redrum at Fort Fringe to see 1UP Theatre's Saving Private Poo"a violent smashing-together of the film Saving Private Ryan and A.A. Milne's classic Winnie-the-Pooh characters"you…
To be honest, I'm a little bit scared to review Fringe veteran John Feffer's new play, Interrogation. For one, he makes it very clear that he has access to my name, email address, and employ…
