1,020 stories by "Nelson Pressley"
When Arena Stage moved into its newly expanded $135 million complex two years ago, the company aggressively courted a reputation as a national leader in the field of new American plays. Aren…
British playwright Bryony Lavery begins to explain "Dirt," her world premiere play at Studio Theatre, with a rat story. Several years ago Lavery, best known for the U.K.-U.S. stage hit "Froz…
Is Baltimore theater getting a total overhaul? The core troupe, Center Stage, has a dynamic new artistic director, Kwame Kwei-Armah, now in his first season picking his own shows. The city's…
The Olney Theatre Center is now serving a nostalgic, wisecracking dramedy of Catholic family dysfunction, circa 1959. It's called "Over the Tavern," and it's log-cabin-thick with drippy sent…
You have to follow closely in Pig Iron Theatre Company's "Zero Cost House," a collaboration between the Philadelphia-based experimentalists and Japanese writer Toshiki Okada that was on disp…
Sutton Foster, Broadway's busy leading lady turned hopeful TV star (ABC Family's "Bunheads"), chose to glow softly rather than to beam white-hot Saturday night at George Mason University's C…
Tap is an earthy, feet-on-the-ground style of dance, yet it helps lift the drama "Fly" at Ford's Theatre. Omar Edwards plays a figure called the Tap Griot, and as the show's opening montage …
BALTIMORE " You probably don't know the Strand Theater Company in Baltimore. Tiny joint, converted storefront in the Station North area, 55 seats, just entering its fifth season.
The person …
NEW YORK " Sutton Foster, the musical theater dynamo with the long legs and cheery smile, has won Tony Awards playing indomitable leading ladies in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (2002) and "Any…
"Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris" has always known that embassies are under attack, that diplomatic and romantic relations are chronically strained and that survival is ro…
NEW YORK " Playwright Annie Baker, at 31 a sudden darling of the country's new-play scene, is charmingly laid-back until you bring up a word that often characterizes her barbed, often comic…
No spoilers, but let's skip straight to the end of "The Temperamentals" because that's the most interesting part. The characters in the play by Jon Marans address the audience and explain wh…
Clues that James Long, making his theatrical debut as a wrestler in the Pulitzer-nominated drama"The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity," is in fact a real-life wrestler:
His hair is tied in a…
At first glance, the ingredients of playwright Annie Baker's "Body Awareness" may seem sitcom simple. Take a Vermont lesbian couple " Joyce, a high school cultural studies teacher, and Phyll…
The trippy new drama "Goldfish Thinking" opens with bodies on the floor and a detective inspecting the wreckage. Clues: pay attention to them. Try to keep up. By the end of this cheerfully i…
More than halfway through Rob Handel's agreeably ramshackle drama "A Maze," a debate breaks out about the special nature of artists. Are creative people different from the rest of us? Are th…
"Fun" was the word that book and lyrics writer Howard Ashman used to describe his goal, with composer Alan Menken, for the man-eating plant-from-outer-space musical "Little Shop of Horrors."…
"Subscribe Now!" was the title of a 1977 book by Danny Newman that became the marketing bible for performing-arts institutions in the United States.
"No!" comes the answer from audiences a g…
The Capital Fringe Festival just heaved a sigh of relief: This won't be the last year the quick-hit performance extravaganza occupies its ramshackle compound on New York Avenue NW after all.…
For hard-boiled, up-to-the-minute social relevance, a 1978 musical comedy about a "lil' ole bitty pissant country place" populated by hearts-of-gold hookers might not be the first place you'…
The grand American tradition of singing bright songs through hard times gets a pleasant workout in "Arlen and Berlin Occupy the Fringe," a five-singer cabaret at Source Theatre. An early ton…
It is not the job of Washington theater to be New York lite. There is no reason for our top-flight professional stages to simply replicate last year's Manhattan hits.
On the other hand, ther…
Life is not a cabaret in buttoned-down Washington. Or is it?
The show tune and its close cousins may be making more inroads around town than you'd guess. More than ever, it's possible to fin…
The bliss you feel at the end of Ron Litman's "D.C. Trash" is his triumph, and not just the kind of sentimental uplift of watching an actor in his early 60s who's been hauling garbage lately…
It's impossible to gauge precisely how Mike Daisey's controversial one-man "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" will be different this week when the Apple-Exploits-Chinese-Workers expos…
