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Filtering by Category: theatre
Colin Carmody and Steve Pickering in Wallenstein.
My enthusiastic review of the Shakespeare Theatre's ironicized and much-slimmed-down new version of Wallenstein, an epic of the Thirty Years War first performed in 1798, is in today's Washington City Paper.
To paraphrase the leader of the free world, let me be clear: I liked
Theater J's premiere of Artistic Director Ari Roth's long-gestating,
heavily autobiographical play, Andy and the Shadows. I liked it
a lot. It's too long, its references too scattered and too many, and
at the end you feel like you've spent the the time in the company of a
hyperactive (if uncommonly sensitive and articulate) 19-year-old who
just will not stop talking, ever. But these are good problems to have. Overreach is better than undereach. And the cast is just tremendous.
The play, as I note, has been around in some form since nearly a decade prior to the publication of Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity in 1995, which means it almost certainly also predates Stephen Frears' Y2K film version of the book.
Nevertheless, the play's likeness to the movie is sort of uncanny.
My review of the play in today's Washington City Paper lays out the evidence. Any resemblance to fictional persons, living or dead, is accidental.
Peter Marks's review of Andy and the Shadows from yesterday's Washington Post is a fine piece that does an exceptional job of elucidating the rarer attributes of the play's structure and key performances. I found myself nodding along with his notice as I read it.
FURTHER READING: I interviewed High Fidelity author Nick Hornby in 2009. That's in two parts, here and here.
When it was founded in 1976, The Humana Festival of New American Plays was unique: It was a centralized showcase of new work from playwrights around the country. Decades later, new play development is no longer consolidated in a single spot, but the festival continues to a enjoy a reputation as a major platform for plays their authors hope will ripple out to stages of every size in the years to come.
I’d never been to Humana, so I was excited by an invitation to Louisville to cover the festival’s closing “industry weekend” with 11 other journalists from around the country, including my pal Michael Phillips, as part of a "pop-up newsroom" called Engine 31. This year’s lineup was the first curated by Obie Award-winning British director Les Waters, who has earned a reputation as a midwife for important new plays by directing premieres from heavy hitters like Sarah Ruhl, Caryl Churchill, and Anne Washburn. The slate Waters programmed featured six new plays (plus a closing-night showcase of 10-minute plays, a festival tradition). I caught four of those, of which three were sufficiently intriguing to make me want to revisit them.
Read MoreMike Daisey. You can trust the man who wears the beard, as long as he isn't singing.
I've written about monologuist Mike Daisey a lot in the last four years, but especially last year, in the wake of damaging revelations about his show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.
He and I met again at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, his performing home here in DC since 2008, last Friday to talk about his new piece, American Utopias, which I review in this week's Washington City Paper. I've just posted an edited, partial transcript of that talk up on Arts Desk.
FURTHER READING: Hoo boy. My 2009 review of Daisey's How Theatre Failed America. My 2010 preview of The Last Cargo Cult. My initial reaction, from March 2012, to The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs controversy, and my reaction to Daisey's reaction. Finally, my July 2012 City Paper cover story about Daisey's return to Woolly Mammoth to perform a revised, fabrication-free version of Agony & Ecstasy.
This is why I never wanted a real job. Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross: The Motion Picture.
No stage production of Glengarry Glen Ross feels complete to me without the speech David Mamet added for the movie version, eight years after his play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984. But Round House Theatre’s Mitchell Hebert-directed version is solid if not revelatory. Reviewed in today’s City Paper.
Photo by Maria Baranova; courtesy Arena Stage.
I reviewed Double Edge's Theatre's The Grand Parade (Of the 20th Century) at Arena Stage.
Unhappy motherfuckes: Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré. (Photo: Teddy Wolff / Studio Theatre)
Embarrassing admission: I didn't realize until after I'd filed my review of Studio's superb production of The Motherfucker with the Hat that its playwright, Stephen Adly Guirgis, is the selfsame motherfucker who wrote The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, the best thing I saw on a DC stage in 2008.
Also reviewed: Spooky Action's Kafka on the Shore, DC's second Frank Galati-scripted stage adaptation of a Haruki Murakami story or novel in four months. This one is looser and more wobbly than the last one. Your mileage may vary.
Today's Washington City Paper is, as always, available wherever fine newspaper are given away for free.
Sara Dabney Tisdale and David Zimmerman play half-human half-siblings.
There's at least one good reason to see Rorschach Theatre's co-world premiere production of Anna Ziegler's The Minotaur: the eponymous beast his own surprisingly rational, philosophical, well-spoken self.
I review the show in today's Washington City Paper.
