The title says it all. Tom Lehrer, the biting musical satirist who took on Jim Crow, the Catholic Church, and the nuisance of urban pigeons in a three-decade heyday spanning from the end of …
"Next Level," written by and starring Elizabeth Cutler, is a charming work in progress about a woman who is a work in progress. Sophie, played with wry good humor by Cutler, is an "editor at…
"Democracy" is a strange, sketch comedy show that ostensibly "takes a look at democracy in a completely unbiased, highly partisan manner." If that is confusing, so is the show. It opens with…
One of the joys of Capital Fringe is the discovery of new talent. Caitlin Frazier, who just recently graduated from Georgetown University, proves herself to be a face to watch with "Re: Writ…
"Who Did It? An Improvised Murder Mystery" opened Capital Fringe Festival last year on the Theater J stage. In my review, I wrote that creator Erick Acuña's comedic whodunnit had flaws bu…
If there is one sure thing at Capital Fringe, it is Pinky Swear Productions (PSP). Even Founding Artistic Director Karen Lange, speaking to the audience just before this year's opening perfo…
Songs of the Goat, a company of actors who all came out of the Studio Acting Conservancy, makes its debut at Capital Fringe with a tight and haunting rendition of Euripides' "Medea." Directo…
One lesson of "Penelope""both the new musical now running at Signature Theatre and the woman at its center"is that it is important to choose one's partners well. Penelope is defined by her h…
If society treats soldiers as machines and war as a game, should it be a surprise when those soldiers lose their humanity? That is the question at the core of the startlingly original produc…
"The Trans-Atlantic Time Traveling Company," a devised work presented by the Theater Alliance at the Anacostia Playhouse, is a vibrant and energetic production stuffed with music, storytelli…
"Measure for Measure" is a problem play. "Desperate Measures" is a problematic musical. To be sure, director Allison Arkell Stockman's current production at Constellation Theatre Company" th…
Director Morgan Duncan's production of Patricia Milton's "The Victorian Ladies' Detective Collective" at the Washington Stage Guild is a spirited and impeccably performed show that rises abo…
Daryl Cloran's adaptation of "As You Like It" may not be the absolute best of the several dozen shows I've seen at the Shakespeare Theatre Company over the past decade or so, but it is certa…
There's an adage that states that no one on their deathbed ever said, "I wish I'd spent more time at work." It encapsulates the theme of "An Irish Carol," a charming but flawed original play…
When "Arms and the Man" opened in the West End in April 1894, George Bernard Shaw found himself called onto the stage after the curtain to receive a cavalcade of applause. The response surpr…
In 2008, a new musical appeared on stage in Victoria, British Columbia. Ambitiously called the second work in the "Uranium Teen Scream Trilogy" (the first was a novel and one-act play and th…
There's no stage, and it does not take place in a theatre. There are no actors, or at least none that can be seen. There is no set and there are no costumes, save those in the audience's ima…
Theatre for young children is deceptively hard to do well. It may seem like simple stories would be the simplest to tell, but it requires great skill to craft such stories in ways that are c…
The Capital Fringe Festival has changed a lot since the days of Fort Fringe and long afternoons at the Baldacchino Tent Bar. The artists behind "TBD: A Devised Theatrical Celebration/A Music…
The publicity for "Attack on Tunggorono" is compelling, which accounts for the full house on the evening I attended. But well before the end of the show, several patrons had quietly slipped …
Shaun Michael Johnson's "I could have set the world on fire" is the rare play that is both too long and too short. The play takes us inside the hospital room of Ernest Williams (played by Jo…
It's a winter night in Paris in 1926. F. Scott Fitzgerald, one year removed from the publication of his breakout hit "The Great Gatsby," is churning out short stories for publication to make…
Martha Mitchell is having a moment. In April 2022, a well-reviewed limited series about the outspoken wife of Attorney General John Mitchell, with Julia Roberts in the lead, began to air. Tw…
The 16th Capital Fringe Festival kicked off Wednesday evening with a true showstopper: a corpse on the Theater J stage. For the next 50 minutes, a crack team of local improvisers tried to fi…
It has been a decade since the Elden Street Players, an all-volunteer community theatre located in a nondescript office park in Herndon, took a leap of faith and reinvented itself as NextSto…