In 1955 James Baldwin had just turned 30 and had written a play about a storefront church in Harlem that he could not get produced in New York. There was "no market" for it, he was told. Coi…
There is nothing like a good old-fashioned plague to get you pondering life's big questions: the Bubonic Plague, the AIDS Crisis, COVID-19, really any epidemic will do. Of course, Jordan Har…
As you enter the Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at A.R.T/NY, you make your way through a professionally installed conceptual art exhibit, in which the artist is one of the works on display.…
There is a drama on stage right now at Studio Theatre"Pass Over by Antoinette Nwandu"so harrowing it will stop your heart. In it, Christopher Lovell and Jalen Gilbert give two of the most po…
You'd have to be dead not to enjoy a recital of the caliber given this past Sunday in the Phillips Collection Music Room by members of the current class of Washington National Opera's Cafrit…
Trouble and controversy have plagued Belgian director Ivo van Hove's re-envisioned revival of West Side Story, playing an open-ended run at the Broadway Theatre, since the beginning, with a …
'Here Be Sirens' is the phrase cartographers used for many centuries to warn sailors of marine dangers. Composer Kate Soper borrowed the name for her musically complex, theatrically rich ope…
News got you nervous? Quaking over coronavirus? Morose about the stock market? Fed up with the Fed? Sick of the swamp? And yet, do you fear if you take your mind off it all for a second, thi…
The history of science is studded with female geniuses snubbed by sexism. There's biophysicist Rosalind Franklin, geneticist Nettie Stevens, chemist Alice Ball" And several such brilliant wo…
After receiving a foreboding prophecy of loss and destruction, the King of Arcadia is determined to outwit the gods and save his kingdom's "beat." To do so, he takes his queen, two daughters…
Something struck me as incredulous about Rasheeda Speaking, a ticking time bomb about racial paranoia interlaced with the destructive power of office politics. But its recently deceased play…
The Spitfire Grill was in Off-Broadway previews on 9/11. In part because its heartwarming, American roots/small-town spirited songs and characters struck a powerful emotional chord in the da…
The Broadway League " the national trade association for the Broadway theater industry, with more than 700 members comprising theater owners, operators, general managers, suppliers, producer…
Irish Repertory Theatre's US premiere of Incantata, which made its acclaimed debut at the 2018 Galway International Arts Festival, is an emotion-packed elegy to the enchantment of love, life…
In my 20s, I lamented that despite being well-schooled in American literature, I'd ended up a failure at knowing much of our nation's poetry by heart. But when I set out to entertain myself …
When Jordan Friend, the highly inventive founder of 4615 Theatre Company, invited me to attend a rehearsal of Museum 2040 a few weeks ago, I jumped at the opportunity. The show, billed as an…
Ready for a dandy production about the complicated life with a child-like diva who happens to be a genius? Then consider Einstein's Wife from ExPats Theatre. Written by Serbian playwright Sn…
On the eve of the day we learned that we still can't elect a woman as qualified as Elizabeth Warren president, the Martha Graham Dance Company returned to the Kennedy Center's Eisenhower The…
Dianna Cuatto, artistic director of the Ballet Theatre of Maryland (BTM), recently announced she would retire in June after leading the company for 17 years. She answered DC Metro Theater Ar…
Taking music from a performer's own culture and pulling it together with more familiar-sounding music into a coherent program for an American audience is often tricky business. If it comes a…
Bandstand, a heart-wrenching musical about a group of veterans returning home from World War II, with music by Richard Oberacker, and book and lyrics by Rob Taylor and Oberacker, is at The N…
Russian author Ivan Turgenev's autobiographical short story "First Love," first published in 1860, is the subject of a new retelling in Culture Project's About Love, now playing a limited en…
Dani Stoller's world-premiere comedy Easy Women Smoking Loose Cigarettes is funny and witty and in its own quirky way quite deep. Plus it puts the screw in screwball. Discovered in the Sigwo…
Monumental Theatre is providing DC-area audiences with a first look at the jukebox musical comedy Head Over Heels. The production features nearly two dozen musical numbers from The Go-Go's p…
The Washington National Opera's current production of Mozart's Don Giovanni confirms two important ideas. The first is that while opera is most effective when it entertains, its intrinsic va…