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Filtering by Category: theatre
Drew Cortese and Quentin Maré in Studio's The Motherfucker with the Hat. (Teddy Wolff)
We're wrapping up a highly rewarding and admirably trend-resistant year on DC's stages, as I aver in this week's Washington City Paper.
Maboud Ebrahimzadeh & Emily Kester. (Igor Dmitry)
The short version of my Washington City Paper review of Sam Holcroft's Edgar and Annabel, now getting its U.S. premiere in a Studio Theatre production directed by the great actor Holly Twyford, is that you have to see it. It synthesizes about a half dozen well-chosen curated cinematic influences while remaining resolutely its own thing.
The other characters in If/Then spend a lot of time talking about how awesome Idina Menzel's character is.
In 2009 I attended a lecture by Jack Viertel, a theatre-critic-turned-producer, elucidating the structure of Broadway musicals. Actually, "lecture" doesn't really reflect what an intimate affair this was. It was more like a musical-appreciation lesson, held in the home of Sasha Anawalt as part of the NEA Institute fellowship for arts journalists writing about theatre that she oversaw. Anyway, Viertel broke down the way these shows work the way screenwriting guru Robert McKee deconstructs commercial movies. He even had musical theatre performers on hand to sing samples of each type of song he described as he detailed its emotional and/or narrative function within the show.
I’d seen only a handful of musicals at that time. I was fascinated to learn what a complicated and tradition-encumbered form it is, and how many different moving parts must to cohere just so to make something that, done right, looks and sounds effortless.
I thought of that lecture last week as I was watching If/Then, the new Idina Menzel-starring musical from the writers of the Pulitzer Prize-and-Tony Award-winning Next to Normal. The show is getting a limited test run here in DC before it opens on Broadway in March. A lot of it doesn't work, but the experience of watching a big, complicated show in draft form was fascinating. Because the character Menzel plays is an urban planner by trade, Architect magazine commissioned me to review it. You can read that piece here.
Ted van Griethuysen, Elizabeth Pierotti, Sarah Marshall, Kimberly Schraf, and Rick Foucheux inThat Hopey Changey Thing. (Photo: Teddy Wolff)
The Studio Theatre has two of Richard Nelson's four Apple Family Plays, the last of which had its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York only last Friday, in repertory. The two at Studio are That Hopey Change Thing and Sweet and Sad. My review of both is on Arts Desk now, and will show up in print in next week's City Paper. Happy Thanksgiving.
I quite liked Keegan Theatre's production of Susan Hill and Stephen Mallatratt's ghost story The Woman in Black. No arts section in this week's City Paper, so my review is web-only.
Hilda Cronje and Bongile Mantsai in Mies Julie. (Rodger Bosch)
My reviews of Mies Julie, a South African August Strindberg update, and Bondage, a 1992 David Henry Hwang play from locals Pinky Swear Productions, are in today's Washington City Paper.
While their origins and scale differ, it's useful to compare the productions to one another. Both plays use the sexual negotiations of an interracial couple as means of discussing the troubled racial histories of their native lands.
Bondage reminded me of David Ives' Venus in Fur, while Mies Julie recalled uncomfortably a slavery-era exploitation flick from 1975 called Mandingo that's come up lately in discussions of Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave. I don't imagine that's what adapter-director Yael Farber was going for, but nothing exists in a vacuum. Anyway, read.
(Darrow Montgomery/WCP)
My profile of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, whose play Appropriate opens at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company tomorrow night, is in today's Washington City Paper. He says he's rewritten it since I saw its premiere at the Humana Festival of New American Plays last April, so I'm curious to see what's changed.
Lawrence Remond & Ryan Tumulty in Inventing Van Gogh. (C. Stanley Photography)
In today's Washington City Paper, I review two shows I mostly liked: Washington Stage Guild's Inventing Van Gogh and Theater J's The Argument.
You are alerted.
