1,020 stories by "Nelson Pressley"
Can you really dare to open a new theater these days with a 31 / 2-hour marathon? Can you risk producing a play " not a musical " that requires 13 actors? Can you bet all your chips on somet…
Carol Channing, Rex Harrison, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurence Olivier, Mae West, Jack Lemmon, Audrey Hepburn, Noel Coward: These are among the legends who have graced the stage of the National T…
Carol Channing, Rex Harrison, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurence Olivier, Mae West, Jack Lemmon, Audrey Hepburn, Noel Coward: These are among the legends who have graced the stage of the National T…
Think of all the wars you've ever heard of across the millennia, right through the current conflict in Syria. How long would it take you to name them? That banal task occupies roughly three …
Just watch him go, man. That's all you can think, beholding the crazy-good vision of Elvis Presley currently gyrating around the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower Theater stage. Cody Slaughter is …
On Christmas Day in 1911, the Empire Theatre opened in downtown Baltimore as a vaudeville house. Look to the peak of its colonnaded Greek facade " the Empire is on Fayette Street, steps from…
The father in Savyon Liebrecht's "Apples From the Desert" is characterized in brief, efficient strokes, and he is a villain. Tuesday's audience at Theater J groaned in dismay at an early, ca…
The rockabilly cats portraying Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins in the stage musical "Million Dollar Quartet" don't come from Broadway. They're not even actors; t…
In the weeks before Christmas, upon D.C. stages Runs holiday fodder for folks of all ages. There's singing. And dancing. And pious "God bless." Some shows convey wonder. And others, a mess. …
The Shakespeare Theatre Company lawyers called Tuesday an "enormous day" as the company won a preliminary injunction in its ongoing tenancy dispute with the Lansburgh Theatre. Though the cas…
Heroes our culture can't stop recycling: James Bonds. Batmen. And, though you may not have thought about this one unless you've visited Bethesda's Round House Theatre for a new origin story …
The thermostat is set at "cozy" for Centerstage's new production of "Bus Stop," the 1955 William Inge drama about a slightly worldly young woman trying to escape the clutches of a love-struc…
Litigate on! Judge John Ramsey Johnson declined to dismiss the dispute between the Shakespeare Theatre Company and its Lansburgh building landlords Friday in D.C. Superior Court. The 2012 T…
"Smash" star Megan Hilty sashayed into Rat Pack territory over the weekend, belting and crooning with a swinging National Symphony Orchestra in a pops concert titled "Luck Be a Lady" at the …
John Malkovich has been a top-shelf slinky villain at least since playing the viper Valmont in the 1988 film "Dangerous Liaisons." He returns to the scene of the crime with his French-langua…
Family Fun Pack season has arrived at the theater, which explains the Rodgers and Hammerstein "Cinderella" at the Olney Theatre Center that looks like a 1960s Rankin-Bass TV kids' special or…
Nova Y. Payton has it. The Voice. When Arlington's Signature Theatre presented a concert version last month of "Crossing," a commissioned musical by local actor-composer Matt Conner, Payton…
Nothing says "Peter Pan" and "ravages of time" like an innocent character entering through a window, which is exactly what the apple-cheeked young title character does in the drama "Mary Ros…
How many vowel sounds can you squeeze out of the word "taxi" or "saucy"? A lot, if you're Rana Kay playing Eliza Doolittle, the dirty-cheeked flower girl transformed into a society princess …
A wonk test for Washington: Is the presidential election to blame for a box-office slump in capital area theaters? Are D.C.'s denizens so busy working on campaigns or blissing out on politic…
The Round House Theatre stage is currently a spacious kitchen, where the culinary advice being served by the jolly host includes this tidbit: better undercooked than overcooked. In the solo …
Conventional storytelling overboard! The aggressively bizarre little play now paddling hard in the Shop at Fort Fringe takes the Titanic as a starting point for flitting mind games. With its…
Nick Olcott isn't really a big-time food guru. He's just playing one onstage. But the prospect of becoming James Beard in the solo show "I Love to Eat," at Bethesda's Round House Theatre, ha…
Actor Niall Buggy turns speeches into full-blown storms in Tom Murphy's "A Whistle in the Dark," braying and chest thumping as his character, a crude patriarch called Dada, urges his thuggis…
Friday night at the Kennedy Center, Maureen McGovern spent 90 minutes living in the past, and it was a beautiful place to be. Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, the Beatles " tune after tune from th…