No Jacket Required, Apparently: Talking Death of a Salesman, In the Heights, and The Wild Party on Around Town

You can see for yourself what a business-casual mood I was in the day Robert Aubry Davis, Jane Horwitz, and I convened at WETA to shoot a fresh batch of Around Town segments. Perhaps you are correct that I should have chosen a shirt that is not the same shade as our studio backdrop. Hey, I don't tell you how to do your part-time job.

I reviewed Ford's Death of a Salesman and Constellation's The Wild Party for the Washington City Paper. For In the Heights, the musical I herein refer to as "Lin-Manuel Miranda's THX-1138," I didn't write about it. I just bought four more tickets the morning after to take my folks.

Mercy Is For Closers: Ford's Death of a Salesman, reviewed.

Craig Wallace, Kim Schraf, Danny Gavigan, and Thomas Keegan as the Lomans. (Carol Rosegg)

What can you do with Death of a Salesman, a play that has never really fallen out of circulation since it debuted almost 70 years ago? Just stay out of its way. Here’s my Washington City Paper review of Ford’s Theatre’s new Craig Wallace-starring production, which I loved.

The Heaven Over New York: Angels in America, Part I: Millennium Approaches and Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika, reviewed.

Mitchell Hébert and Jon Hudson Odom in Perestroika. (Danisha Crosby)

Lemme tell ya, people: It was much easier to figure out why Tony Kusher's most recent play is lousy than it was to try to figure out why Angels in America, the epic masterpiece that shall be his legacy, is so good. You have countless other, more reputable sources on that, of course. I was just writing about the show's latest and largest local revival, the product of a Marvel Team-Up between Olney Theatre Center and Round House Theatre.

While researching this review I discovered that Mike Nichols' 2003 HBO miniseries of Angels in America earned four-stars-out-of-four for its artistic merit and four-for-four for its depiction of the nursing profession on the website The Truth About Nursing.

FURTHER READING: Here's my review of the 2011 revival of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, which came to Arena Stage four years ago. It was the first major play to address the AIDS crisis, and it was written from inside the trenches with shells exploding all around. Which is at least one of the reasons it hasn't had (in my opinion) the afterlife the more contemplative and mythic Angels, written several years afterward, has had. (Twelve years elapsed between Angels' premiere and its emergence as an HBO miniseries; for The Normal Heart to go from the stage to HBO took 29 years.)

Once again, Isaac Butler and Dan Kois' mighty oral history of Angels in America—soon to be expanded to book-length!—is here, and highly recommended.

Feline Fatale: The Lieutenant of Inishmore, reviewed.

Megan Dominy and Thomas Keegan get bloody (Constellation Theatre Co.)

I reviewed Constellation Theatre Company's new production of Martin McDonagh's bloody 2001 farce The Lieutenant of Inishmore in today's Washington City Paper. The fine Washington Post story I cite (by David Segal, not long after he'd handed off his gig as the paper's pop music critic to my pal Josh du Lac) about the blood work in the play's U.S. premiere back in 2006 is here.

Too Past for Love: Signature's Dying City and Spooky Action's Reckless, reviewed

​Rachel Zampelli & Thomas Keegan in Signature's Dying City (Scott Suchman)

My reviews of new productions of Christopher Shinn's somber 2006 drama Dying City and Craig Lucas's surreal 1983 comedy Reckless are in today's Washington City Paper.