No Scrubs, No Skips: "CrazySexyCool," reviewed for CityCast DC

Holli’ Gabrielle Conway, Jade Milan and Stoney B. Woods as T-Boz, Left Eye and Chilli in CrazySexyCool. (Julieta Cervantes)

My review of CrazySexyCool is my first for CityCast DC, where I’ll be contributing regularly, I’m glad to say. The TL:DR on the new TLC show is that music and dancing are great, while director / book writer Kwame Kwei-Armah deploys his artistic license to compress and dramatize the pioneering Atlanta girl-group’s saga in some confounding ways. Considering that all of this history has been told not just in documentaries like 2024’s TLC Forever, but in name-naming dramatizations like the 2013 TV movie CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story, I didn’t get why so many easily identified figures get pseudonyms here — including longtime TLC manager Bill Diggins, who produced the musical!

As the end of the opening-night performance June 26, Diggins joined TLC’s two surviving members, Tionne "T-Boz" Watkins and Rozonda "Chilli" Thomas, on-stage to congratulate the cast and crew. In show, Diggins is called “Danny.” He’s played by DC actor Aaron Bliden, whose castmates turned to salute him after the real Chilli quipped to Diggins during their post-show remarks, “I didn’t know you could sing.”

Weird! But those two-dozen TLC bangers still bang.

House of Cards: Arena's "Freemont Ave," reviewed.

Bradley Gibson plays three generations of men in the Family Plique in Freemont Ave. (Marc J. Franklin)

My Washington City Paper review of Freemont Ave., a multi-generational world premiere from playwright Reggie D. White at Arena Stage, is here.

Why, ay? "A Wrinkle in Time," reviewed.

TIme wrinkles in Arena Stage’s new musical. (T Charles Erickson)

It’s tough not to root for a new musical adaptation of Madeleine L’Engel’s seminal YA novel A Wrinkle in Time. I hope its creators will try, try again.

"We Are Gathered" to witness a real, legal marriage at Arena Stage

Kyle Beltran and Nic Ashe in We Are Gathered, a play that accompanies their characters’ fictional marriage with real ones. (T Charles Erickson)

I spent a beautifuly day with Jean Yoder and Rhys Price, who got married on stage in the finale of a performance of Arena Stage’s We Are Gathered. My Washington Post feature about their wedding day is here.

Prude Mechanicals, or Pore Newland Is Daid: Arena's "The Age of Innocence," reviewed.

An Archer misses the target. Shereen Ahmed and A.J. Shively in The Age of Innocence. (Daniel Rader)

Another Gilded Age, another pandemic. The time is right for another look at The Age of Innocence, more now than in 1993, when Martin Scorsese made his marvelous film of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel. Turning in into a movie made sense. And putting it on stage? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it might’ve worked better as a musical.

My full Washington Post review 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.

Don't Fly With Me: Arena's "Catch Me If You Can," reviewed.

Hayley Podschun, Alexandra Frohlinger, Christian Thompson and Rhett Guter in Arena’s revised-but-still unsatisfying Catch Me If You Can. (Margot Schulman)

Catch Me If You Can, the Hairspray songwriters’ attempt to musicalize Steven Spielberg’s beloved 2002 film, didn’t take off on Broadway 11 years ago. The revised version now at Arena Stage doesn’t work, either. For the Washington City Paper.

527 Dog Years: Mike Daisey Tells "A People's History"

Class is in session. (Darrow Montgomery for the Washington City Paper)

Mike Daisey is an artist I've written about more often and in greater detail than only anyone else. He's certainly the artist with to whom I've spent the most time speaking directly. The reviews I've written of his monologues and the features I've reported about how he creates them and editorial I was once moved to write in his defense all reflect my great admiration for his work.

That has not prevented me from condemning him when I think he's deserved it, and he did do something that warranted condemnation, years ago. I will say that in the third year of a Donald J. Trump administration, it seems awfully quaint that so many journalists who had never publicly discussed theatre at all before they lined up to express their outrage at Daisey in the spring of 2012 got so steamed over a guy who tells stories in theaters for a living taking some liberties with one of them.

Anyway, Daisey's wildly ambitious current show A People's History—an 18 part retelling of American history circa 1492-to-now, based heavily on the work of Howard Zinn but also on Daisey's own life—is the subject of my second Washington City Paper cover story about him, available today wherever finer Washington, DC alt-weeklies are given away for free. My 2012 WCP story detailing the problems he created for himself with his show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and his effort to remedy them, is here. In fact, all of my writings about Daisey are mere clicks away! How much time do you have?