The crowd that came to The Birchmere last night to See Jane Sing! got a great big ol' cabaret show full of offbeat tunes and upbeat fun. Jane Lynch wowed 'em with her artful blend of agil…
I had a wonderful time chatting with the multi-talented Jane Lynch. Jane: How are you, John? John: I'm good, thank you, Jane. I'm a complete Gleek. Good for you! My husband and I watch every…
In the words of Countess Aurelia, the title character in Jean Giraudoux's comedy The Madwoman of Chaillot, "Nothing is ever so wrong in this world that a sensible woman can't set right in th…
Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play is an epic three-part play set in three eras"Queen Elizabeth’s England, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, and Ronald Reagan’s America. It's a fancifully …
If there is a post-9/11 theater in America"the way there was, for instance, a postwar theater in Europe"it just got bigger than before. A new play opened last night that offers a sharp new t…
"You have no idea what I've been through," says Luke early on in Kid Victory, the nervy and unnerving new musical by John Kander (music) and Greg Pierce (book and lyrics) that just opened at…
An update: I went back to see Clandestine Arts’ production of Bare last night (Friday, January 27th) and found the show even more enjoyable than the first time. The quality of  m…
People rarely go to the theater anymore to know what a playwright thinks. We go to be entertained, we go to be moved, we go to be told stories, which might involve hearing what assorted char…
I knew I would be bummed if I missed the Round House Theatre production of Gina Gionfriddo's Rapture, Blister, Burn. Everything I read told me, "John, you gotta see this." So when I caught i…
A young new theater company called Clandestine Arts has come to town and marked its arrival by tackling the beautifully scored coming out musical Bare: A Pop Opera. With a spirited cast of 1…
There were many moments in Naomi Wallace's The Trestle at Poe Lick Creek, as interpreted by Director Jodi Kanter at The George Washington University’s Department of Theatre and Dan…
The connectivity crew at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company creates some of the most imaginative audience-engagement gimmicks in town. Typically tied to, and expressive of, the themes inside a p…
Anna Deavere Smith's classic Fires in the Mirror is getting a fascinating production this weekend by a very talented ensemble of student actors at Howard University. And on two counts this i…
John Stoltenberg:Â It's great that Molly Smith, artistic director of Arena Stage, and Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of Signature Theater, have initiated what will become the Women's Vo…
Martin McDonagh is one of my favorite living playwrights, and I've loved his black comedy The Lieutenant of Inishmore every time I've seen it. So for me the Constellation Theatre Company pro…
Each year at Valentine's Day time, thousands of college and community groups around the world present staged readings and productions of The Vagina Monologues, by Tony Award"winning playwrig…
"I'm not dead, I'm just hurt real bad," says Regina, a young woman whose life is a painful wreck, a sorry mess. She's homeless, rejected and shut out, even by her mother. She is an outsider …
No girl grows up dreaming of terminating a pregnancy. There are plenty of aspirational fantasies out there"some good for her, some not"but to be in a situation where she decides to have an a…
An intriguing question runs through Life Sucks (Or the Present Ridiculous), which is whether in fact life sucks or not. Is life inherently such a bummer that there's no point going on? Or is…
There comes a scene in Choir Boy at The Studio Theatre when five young black men stand naked in dimly lit separate shower stalls singing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" in gloriou…
Natsu Onoda Power's delightfully devised theater piece The T Party could not have a more perfect home than Michael Dove's quintessentially inclusive Forum Theatre. At Forum every walk-up tic…
In the week following Ari Roth's firing as Artistic Director of Theater J, I talked with him about his vision of theater. It was a topic that mattered to me personally, because I had come to…
Graphic language can slam us and disturb us in a way that is unique to live theater. Visceral and muscular diction in performance can burn images into our mind's eye as no cinema can. The po…
This is a big play," the playwright Tony Kushner has said without understatement, and without an argument from anyone. It's sprawling and sweeping and awesome in depth and breadth. It's also…
Love and song go together so well they're a compound noun. Who doesn't love a love song? But what about love that is disappointing, unreciprocated, wounding"all the loves that dare not speak…