208 stories by "Susan Berlin"
Ordinary Days, the lovely small musical now at Round House Theatre in Bethesda, Maryland, is about how something as inconsequential as a misplaced piece of paper can change lives—even in i…
Abby Mann's 2001 play began as a television drama in 1959 and a movie in 1961, and onstage it plays rather choppily as individual scenes bridged by musical cues and shifts in lighting.
... director and adapter Derek Goldman and his four actors ably integrate the dry, literate humor of the original with entertaining stage business.
With a knockout cast and staging that never slows for a minute, Arena Stage's glorious production of Smokey Joe's Café - The Songs of Leiber and Stoller is a crowd-pleaser of the highest de…
Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, has gathered a powerful cast for a strong production that places the action in a near-future London overwhelmed with crime, homelessness, and povert…
Henry IV, Part 2 currently at Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company brings William Shakespeare's two-part saga to a thoughtful and majestic conclusion. Director Michael Kahn works comfort…
The Fiasco Theater of New York City, currently performing at Washington's Folger Theatre, has staged a mildly entertaining version of the play that manages to smooth the rough edges of the p…
The 30th Annual Helen Hayes Awards, were held by theatreWashington April 21 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
[Stacy] Keach is magnetic as he draws out all the contradictory sides of Falstaff: charming and exasperating, a self-deceiver who tells lies both for fun and for self-preservation, a drunkar…
The basis of Wright's vision is the centrality of religion to the lives of the three partners. One scene lays out the similarities and differences without hitting the audience over the head:…
The American Century Theater in Arlington, Virginia, has resuscitated Arthur Kopit's outrageous 1962 farce, written as the buttoned-up 1950s began moving tentatively toward becoming the wide…
The challenge facing a reviewer writing about I and You, the two-character drama now at the Olney Theatre Center in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, is how much and how little to say abou…
Beaches, the musical receiving its world premiere at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, does many things well, but it still needs some work before all the pieces can fit together.
The premise is that these actors—three African-American and three white—want to tell the story of a largely forgotten genocide, but they keep running into problems with cultural appropri…
Battles of words can be just as deadly as any other form of warfare. That is the primary message of Seminar, the comedy by Theresa Rebeck now at Round House Theater in Bethesda, Maryland.
Olney Artistic Director Jason Loewith—himself one of the authors of a much darker work about the business culture, Adding Machine: A Musical—here demonstrates his skill as a director of …
The last time Kathleen Turner appeared at Arena Stage in Washington, she was playing the outspoken journalist Molly Ivins. Now she's back as the indomitable Mother Courage, making her way as…
Washington's Folger Theatre and director Robert Richmond have brought a new, unexpected perspective to their production of William Shakespeare's Richard III.
The dynamic Freda Payne is the primary reason to see Ella Fitzgerald: First Lady of Song, the latest biographical musical, at MetroStage in Alexandria, Virginia. While Lee Summers' book foll…
This 1997 work by Jeanine Tesori (music) and Brian Crawley (book and lyrics) touches on questions of faith, love, truth, and beauty—but does so in a delicate way that, at times, is less th…
The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington and director Keith Baxter have staged a dazzling production of The Importance of Being Earnest, featuring a cast of performers who all understan…
Signature Theatre led Washington area professional theaters with 20 Helen Hayes Award nominations, followed by 16 for Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and 15 for the Shakespeare Theatre Compan…
laywright-performer Daniel Beaty restores Robeson to his rightful, larger-than-life stature in The Tallest Tree in the Forest, a one-person play now in the Kreeger Theater at Arena Stage in …
Bang the Drum Slowly, the current production of American Century Theater in Arlington, Virginia, is achingly sincere but too often dramatically inert.
Director Paata Tsikurishvili has set the comedy of misunderstandings in the 1920s of silent movies, bootleggers, and conspicuous consumption, which allows for some of William Shakespeare's m…
