Something Wicked This Way Comes: "All the Devils Are Here," reviewed.

Creator/performer Patrick Page dances with the devils. (Julieta Cervantes)

I missed the by-all-accounts-world-beating King Lear that Patrick Page headlined for the Shakespeare Theatre Company last year, as press night was the night before my knee surgery. But I was happy to review his masterclass in skullduggery All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain for the Paper of Record.

After the Tornado: Talking with Gillian Welch for WaPo

David Rawlings and Gillian Welch (Alysse Gafkjen)

I spoke with the great Gillian Welch about one of my favorite subjects — setlist-making — and about how she and David Rawlings put a (great) song called "Hashtag" on a (great) album otherwise populated by (great) tunes with titles like "Lawman," "Turf the Gambler," and "Howdy Howdy." For The Washington Post.

"Moana 2" is a Sea-Plus Musical Sea-Quel

Maui and Moana return in Moana 2, a film as inspired as its title. (Disney)

The Disney musical sequel Moana 2 is, like David Lynch’s surreal adult masterpiece Mulholland Drive before it, a repurposing of material originally intended for the small screen. My Washington Post review is here.

Bigger, Longer, and Uncut: "Gladiator II," reviewed.

Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal get down to it. (Paramount)

“Gladiator was the one where Ridley Scott revived the sword-and-sandals genre that had been dormant for decades while also managing to suggest that our addiction to spectacle—one he himself had then been nurturing for 20 years—might not be altogether healthy, for individuals or democracies. 

“Gladiator II is the one where he throws in a CGI shark. “

My Washington City Paper of the unlikely 24.5-years-later sequel is here.

The Resilience of Laughter: "Dance Like There's Black People Watching," reviewed.

Jillian Ebanks, Breon Arzell, Max Thomas, Tamieka Chavis, and Arlietta Hall. (Teresa Castracane)

The Second City’s first show at Woolly Mammoth, Barack Stars, from those heady first months of the Obama Administration, was the subject of one of my first reviews for the Washington City Paper. My Washington Post review of their latest, offered in more dire times, is here.

The Conscience of a Coder: "Data," reviewed.

Isabel Van Natta and Karan Brar in the tech thriller Data. (T. Charles Erickson Photography)

Imagine, if your capacity for speculative, blue-sky doomsday pessimism can possibly conceive of such a scenario, the union of a morally flexible tech oligarch and a U.S. government hostile to immigration and intolerant of dissent.

My Washington Post review of Data, playwright Matthew Libby’s world-premiere thriller at Arena Stage, is here.

A.I., Boomer: "Here," reviewed."

Robin Wright and Tom Hanks get decades shaved off by an A.I. tool called Metaphysic Live in Here. (Sony)

On Here, the reunion of Forrest Gump principals, for the Paper of Record.

Lots here about Bob Zemeckis’s obsession with still-janky digital de-aging tech. Spike Lee’s 2020 war-vet drama Da Five Bloods achieved more stirring results by making no attempt to hide its 60-something-year-old cast members’ ages in the flashback scenes set during their combat tours in Vietnam half a century prior.

I’m rooting for Zemeckis. Flight is great. I liked Allied, his 2016 WWII espionage thriller that no one saw, too.

R & J, IRL: Folger's "Romeo and Juliet," reviewed.

Cole Taylor and Caro Reyes Rivera as those star-cross’d young lovers. (Erika Nizborski)

You know that game where you try to think of old movies or plays where the introduction of cell phones would spoil the plot? Romeo and Juliet has always seemed like an obvious one, but Raymond O. Caldwell, director of the Folger’s season-opening update of the tragedy, begs to differ. My Washington Post review is here.