Larson's THX-1138: "tick... tick... BOOM!"

Brandon Uranowitz in tick… tick… BOOM! (Teresa Castracane)

With chief theatre critic Peter Marks having abdicated, the Paper of Record looks to its loyal cadre of contributors to fill the void, at least for now. My review of the Kennedy Center’s new Neil Patrick Harris-directed tick… tick… BOOM!, an expansion of the 2001 three hander musical that was already upscaled from the “rock monologue” Jonathan Larson performed as a solo piece before creating RENT, is here.

It was my editor’s suggestion to move a comment I had calling this piece Larson’s THX-1138 up into the lede. It struck me that Superbia, the never-finished dystopian future-set musical that Larson laments he’s been working on for five years in tick…, sounds quite similar to the experimental film George Lucas made before finding fame with American Graffiti and Star Wars. Equally forbidding, equally uncommercial.

Nasty Women, Repped: Dry Land and What Every Girl Should Know, reviewed.

Yakima Rich and Emily Whitford in Ruby Rae Spiegel's play Dry Land. (Forum Theatre)

My review of Forum Theatre's "Nasty Women Rep," comprised of Ruby Ray Spiegel's Dry Land and Monica Byrne's What Every Girl Should Know, took longer to appear than it should have, but it's up now. These two shows sustain Forum's reputation for bold, timely work, and I recommend them—Dry Land, especially.

Fight Call: On the Welders' new MMA play The Girl in the Red Corner

Audrey Bertaux and Jennifer J. Hopkins grapple in rehearsal for The Girl in the Red Corner. (Photo: Darrow Montgomery)

Today's Washington City Paper has a feature from me about a new play from the DC theatre collective The Welders set in the milieu of mixed martial arts. It's by Stephen Spotswood, a prolific dramatist whose work I have followed with interest for the last five years or so, and it's the first play about a bloodsport here in DC since Studio Theatre did Sucker Punch in early 2012. (I did a feature on that one, too.) You can use the link above, or pick up a dead-tree copy wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away for free.

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.

Gay for Play: La Cage Aux Folles, reviewed.

Brent Barrett surrounded by Les Cagelles (Signature).

My review of Signature Theatre's robust revival of Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's beloved Reagan-era musical farce La Cage Aux Folles is in this week's Washington City Paper. I like the show, but I don't like my review as much as the one I wrote of the Goodspeed Opera House's production about a year ago, as part of my coursework for the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center's National Critics Institute. Which is odd, because I remember thinking I was producing mostly unpublishable copy while I was there. I've never been a fast writer. Most days we had copy due at 8:30 or 9 a.m. about the show we'd seen the night before. Anyway, the Critic Class of 2016 starts their two-week term on Saturday. Good luck, you guys. I envy you, sort of — just not your early-a.m. deadlines or your accommodations or your on-campus meals. 

Actually, the coffee was pretty decent. I drank a lot of it, at any rate.

2 Midsummer 2 Dreamz

Daven Ralston as Puck with Alex Vernon's shadow puppets of Titania and Oberon in WSC Avant Bard's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

I spent a midwinter day and evening taking in two, two, two big productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, from WSC Avant Bard and the Folger Theatre. I reviewed the experience for this week's unusually me-heavy Washington City Paper.

Aniello, I Love You, Won't You Tell Me Your Name?

Vaughn Irving, Doug Wilder, Farrell Parker, and Suzanne Edgar perform their musical "You, or Whatever I Can Get" in the 2014 Capital Fringe Festival. 2015 Aniello Award winner Flying V will remount the show starting next week. (Paul Gillis)

After covering theater in DC on a regular basis for seven or eight years, it's clear to me that what I like and what Helen Hayes Awards judges like sometimes overlap but more often do not. But I very much appreciate that the Haysies created a new award eight years ago in the name of longtime DC theatre patron John Laurentzen Aniello Jr. to recognize outstanding start-up theatre companies, because making good art is difficult, difficult, lemon difficult and keeping a theatre company afloat ain't so easy, either.

I wrote a feature about the Aniello Award and its recent winners for the Washington City Paper. My sincere, red-faced apologies to The Welders and for Flying V Theatre Company for a couple of boneheaded reporting errors that I allowed to slip into the print version. (They've been corrected online.) Also, apologies to Matt Reckeweg, co-founder of Pointless Theatre Company, which won the Aniello in 2014. He gave me some helpful insights but his comments were regrettably cut from the story for space.

Hey, what happened to my 2014 FringeCasting Couch interview with the cast of Flying V's You, or Whatever I Can Get?