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Filtering by Category: theatre
John de Lancie, Brian George, and Haaz Sleiman (Mosaic Theatre)
My Washington City Paper review of Jon Robin Baitz's already-anachronistic Trump satire Vicuña, which is getting a lavish second production at Mosaic Theatre after premiering in Los Angeles last year, is here.
Robbie Gay, Cody Nickell, Nigel Gore, Chris Genebach, and Anthony Michael Martinez as Roman soldiers. (Teresa Wood)
My Shakespeare professor at James Madison University, Ralph Cohen, told us Antony and Cleopatra was his favorite Shakespeare play. Robert Richmond's new production for the Folger Theatre, with Cody Nickell and Shirine Babb in the title roles, took me back to my salad days. I reviewed the show in this week's Washington City Paper. Individual issues are free but the paper is currently for sale. It's all very confusing.
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.
Farrell Parker (center) is the best reason to see Constellation's The Wild Party. (AJ Guban)
A surfeit of arts coverage in last week's Washington City Paper means it took my reviews of Forum's Caryl Churchill experiment Love and Information and Constellation's Jazz Age musical The Wild Party 'til now to appear. They're in the paper this week.
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.
Caroline Stefanie Clay and Tyee Tilghman in Skeleton Crew. (Teresa Wood)
You've got two, two, two big shows written by and starring people of color up in the District just now: Skeleton Crew, the third entry in Dominique Morisseau's Detroit series, has the same concerns as Lynne Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat but it's a better play, and Studio Theatre's production is built to last. And Psalmayene 24's multi Helen Hayes Award-winning production of Marc Bamuthi Joseph's Word Becomes Flesh is back at Theatre Alliance for a remount starring the same superb cast it did last year. I review both in this week's Washington City Paper. For which I also wrote the cover story, for some reason. It's not like I get paid by the word, people.
Amy Saidman (center), seen in this 2005 postcard, wanted to be clear this was not for kids.
The oral yarn-spinning concern now known by the moniker Story District is the subject of this week's Washington City Paper cover feature—my fourth, I think. I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out. I only regret that I didn't find the right space to mention John Kevin Boggs, who was a huge contributor to that organization, and to DC's performing arts community in general, as a storyteller and instructor. He passed away in March of 2015, much, much too soon.
*Kinda. The Speakeasy open mics, which were started by Washington Storytellers Theatre (est. 1991), began in 1997. WST became SpeakeasyDC in 2005 and then Story District in 2015.
Gwydion Suilebhan, the playwright who by day is Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's marketing chief, knows how to tailor a pitch. He hooked me on the idea of doing a feature about Woolly co-founder Howard Shalwitz's return to acting after almost a decade away by suggesting that Shalwitz is DC theatre's answer to John Cazale. I took him so literally that I had a couple of paragraphs to that effect that my first draft:
Gwydion Suilebhan, Woolly’s Director of Brand and Marketing but also an oft-produced playwright, likens Shalwitz to John Cazale, an actor now remembered mainly by pub-quiz champs and committed cinephiles. Before he died of cancer in 1978, Cazale appeared in only five feature films, but every one earned a Best Picture nomination. Three of them won; all remain revered. Probably most famous for his role as the hapless Fredo Corleone in the Godfather pictures, Cazale set a never-to-be-surpassed standard for quality control.
It’s an imperfect comparison. Part of the Cazale legend was its compression: He made five towering films in six years, and then he died. Shalwitz’s performances have been parceled out over decades. And though Shalwitz himself has usually been praised, reception to the shows overall has been more mixed-positive than universal adoration. (With the exception of Full Circle, his entire body of work as an actor predates my own tenure as a critic.) The Arsonists is only the third time he’s performed in Woolly’s airy, modern, Penn Quarter playhouse since the company moved into its permanent home a dozen years ago.
It was still a good idea for a story, so here's the story. Thanks, Gwydion, and Howard, and everyone who talked to me or tried to get in touch with me for it, whether your comments ended up in the piece or not.
