A New DC Streetcar Pulls Into Dupont Underground
It’s been a little over a week since the DC Streetcar completed its last trip on H Street NE, but a new one is about to pull into Dupont Underground. In a stripped-back version of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, which will play in the tunnel from April 20 through May 4 under the direction of locally recognized actor Nick Westrate, Blanche DuBois will step onto the platform very much alive and characteristically unwell, but probably unlike you’ve ever seen her before.
Who’s to Blame When the Theater Critic Disappears?
When longtime Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks announced in December 2023 that he accepted a buyout and would be leaving the paper after more than 20 years, artists and audiences took to social media to thank him for his service to D.C.’s theater scene. Several months later, when the paper announced that it had selected a New York-based critic to fill the vacancy as a “frequent visitor to D.C.,” many of those same people met the decision with outrage (despite Marks having been similarly based in New York for the latter half of his tenure). How, they asked, could the critic for our hometown paper cover the region’s 89 professional theaters if he lived more than 200 miles away? Were there no local writers capable of filling the only remaining full-time theater critic position in the Washington metro area, itself one of the country’s last such staff positions?
Review: Arena Stage’s Chez Joey Is Bewitching, but at Times Bothering and Bewildering Too
The joy of musical standards lies in reinterpretation. In the case of “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” the centerpiece of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical Pal Joey based on John O’Hara’s 1940 novel of the same name, there are plenty to choose from: Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Linda Ronstadt, Sammy Davis Jr., and even a duet version with Rod Stewart and Cher. But in Chez Joey, a new musical inspired by Pal Joey playing through March 15 at Arena Stage, book writer Richard LaGravanese and choreographer and “orchestrologist” Savion Glover (co-directing with Scandal star Tony Goldwyn) are taking reinterpretation to the next level by crafting a new story and set list from the old musical using songs from across the Rodgers and Hart catalog. The resulting play lives up to Pal Joey’s primary anthem, and is mostly bewitching, at times bothersome, and occasionally bewildering.
Review: Little Miss Perfect at Olney Theatre Vies for Virality
In his lyrical retrospective, Finishing the Hat, legendary composer Stephen Sondheim set out his three rules of writing: less is more; God is in the details; and content dictates form. That’s not to say these are the only or definitive rules, of course, as evidenced by Joriah Kwamé’s Little Miss Perfect—a world premiere musical playing at Olney Theatre Center through March 8—which flips the last rule to construct a whole musical from a single YouTube viral hit. But whereas other social media musicals like Ratatouille: The Musical and The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical have found their stride sticking mostly to the platforms that bore them, translating “Little Miss Perfect” to Little Miss Perfect has proven a more difficult task, at times falling victim to its own desire for virality.
Review: ‘Paranormal Activity’ at Shakespeare Theatre Company is a horror hoot
You should know that I am not the target audience for Paranormal Activity, a stage adaptation of the Paramount Pictures movie franchise running at Shakespeare Theatre Company through February 7. I am a wimp, a wuss, a weenie, with a time-tested talent for weaseling out of movie nights with even a whiff of public fright. But more so, I am a sucker for spectacle, and this Paranormal Activity — which leans heavily on illusion and ambient creepiness instead of the “found-footage” format of its film iterations — is a horror hoot.
Review: There’s a Crack on the Side of Signature’s In Clay
It begins with a baseball-size lump of gray clay, which she unwraps from a piece of damp cloth so quickly that it takes an extra moment to realize what she’s holding. Then it’s on the wheel, spinning ceaselessly as she dips her hand into a rusty pail and shovels water onto the ball with her palm. More spinning, her hand flattening the mass, then more water, and her thumbs push up the side of the soft slab until it’s tall. The music is swelling now, unfazed by another splash, and her thumbs rotate, pressing down to form a well in the center. The music is still driving, but the wheel has stopped and she’s pulled a wire taut—another sleight of hand—and scrapes it against the flat base, releasing the perfect pot into her hand. She’s standing now, depositing it into the kiln, letting hours pass in a few breaths until the clay is finally cool and she can lift it high like a divine tribute, ignorant of the deep crack only the audience sees. She notices and she sighs. So goes an unforgettable pas de deux (pot de deux?) between real-life artist Marie–Berthe Cazin (Alex Finke) and her creation in the new musical In Clay, making its U.S. premiere at Arlington’s Signature Theatre through Feb. 1 under director Kimberly Senior.
Review: Mosaic’s A Case for the Existence of God Offers a Muddled Argument
There’s unspeakable devastation in actor Lee Osorio’s eyes when his character, Ryan, confronts the prospect that he may not get the mortgage he needs to build his dream home in Samuel D. Hunter’s A Case for the Existence of God. (Mosaic Theater Company’s production plays at the Atlas Performing Arts Center through Dec. 14.) He suggests to his mortgage broker, Keith (Jaysen Wright), that he might call the bank himself. He’s a good guy, after all, and if he can just explain his plans and dreams to them, they’ll approve the loan. Right? “They don’t care about who you are as a person,” Keith says, dismissing Ryan’s naivete. “It’s just numbers to them.”
Theater Matriarch Paula Vogel Brings Revised The Mother Play to Studio
It comes as a surprise when Paula Vogel—the frank and fearless Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose expansive body of work has tackled topics as challenging as incest, antisemitism, homophobia, and sexual violence—describes herself as the aspiring “Grandma Moses” of the American theater. She means that, at 73, she has no intentions of slowing down: A revised version of her latest work, The Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions, opens at Studio Theatre this month, a memoir with Penguin Press is forthcoming, and a stage adaptation of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? with director Marianne Elliott and choreographer Steven Hoggett is in the works. She also has a number of percolating ideas for musical projects.