What Happens in Orlando Stays in Orlando: As You Like It, reviewed.

Lindsay Alexandra Carter and Antoinette Robinson as Rosalind and Celia, respectively.

As You Like It is my favorite Shakespearean comedy after Twelfth Night, but when the actor playing Orlando can't hang with the actor playing Rosalind, it prevents this pleasant diversion from being something deeper. I reviewed the Folger Theatre's production in this week's Washington City Paper.

Court Disorder: Roe, reviewed.

Sara Bruner and Jim Abele as Norma McCorvey and Flip Benham in Roe.

My review of Lisa Loomer's Roe — an "openly didactic wiki-play" that was never meant to be as timely as it is — is in this week's Washington City Paper.

This would've been a good one to discuss with the student critics I had the privilege of working with at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival last week. Usually I'm loath to summarize the plot of a play, or to foreground my own political leanings in a review. But when the plot is a history, and our politics desperate, that puts one in a bind.

Kitchen-Sink Drama: The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family, reviewed.

Amy Warren, Maryann Plunkett, Lynn Hawley, and Meg Gibson in Hungry at the Public in 2016.

My review of playwright/director Richard Nelson's three-play cycle The Gabriels, which I took in during a single nine-hour period at the Kennedy Center last Sunday, is in this week's Washington City Paper.

PREVIOUSLY: I reviewed Studio Theatre's two double-features of Nelson's four Apple Family plays in 2013 and 2015.

Unsinkable? Unthinkable! Signature Theatre's all-singing, all-dancing Titanic, reviewed.

Christopher Bloch, Nick Lehan, Lawrence Redmond, and Bobby Smith in Signature's Titanic. (Christopher Mueller) 

Signature Theatre has revived Titanic, a multi-Tony Award-winning musical from 1997 that almost no one remembers. Apparently it was upstaged by some movie? My Washington City Paper review is here.

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.

Epic-in-the-Brechtian-Sense Failure: Kiss, reviewed.

Lelia TahaBurt, Shannon Dorsey, Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey, Tim Getman, and Ahmad Kamal in Kiss. 

Feeling compelled to write a play about war or genocide? You've got your work cut out for you, but God bless. Feel compelled to turn your frustration over how hard it is to write a good play about war or genocide into a play? Please stop. A lot of things are about you, but not everything.

Woolly Mammoth's American premiere of Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón's Kiss is not as bad as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present, because nothing I've ever seen on a stage is as myopic and offensive as Jackie Sibblies Drury’s We Are Proud to Present. But it ain't good. I break it down in today's Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis.

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.

Bad Times, Good Times: Studio's Cloud 9 and Constellation's Urinetown, reviewed.

For various critic-related, theater company-related, and publication-related reasons, my reviews of Studio Theatre's production of Caryl Churchill's anticolonial sex romp Cloud 9 and Constellation Theatre Company's new production of the Y2K-era Greg Kotis-Mark Hollman musical Urinetown have taken a long time to see print. But they're in this week's Washington City Paper, and online, too.