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Filtering by Category: theatre
"I have been and always shall be your... twin sibling." Alex Mills as Sebastian and Irina Tsikurishvili as Viola in Twelfth Night. (Koko Lanham)
My reviews of Synetic Theatre's silent, early-cinema-and-Jazz Age-inflected Twelfth Night and Anu Yadav's solo show Meena's Dream are in today's Washington City Paper.
The Adoration of the Shepherds, now attributed to the Renaissance master Giorgione, hangs in the National Gallery of Art.
The authorship of this painting is the ostensible subject of The Old Masters, one of Simon Gray's final plays. My review of Washington Stage Guild's production is in today's Washington City Paper.
Some kind of technical problem prevented a chunk of this week's Washington City Paper from being posted online. My review of Darrah Cloud's play Our Suburb at Theater J was among that chunk, so I'm posting the full text of the review here.
Writer Darrah Cloud’s Internet Movie Database page indicates she was once a prolific imagineer of made-for-TV movies: A Christmas Romance, A Holiday for Love, A Holiday Romance, The Sons of Mistletoe, and -- shades of intrigue! -- Undercover Christmas. I haven’t seen those films, but the titles imply the sort of cornball mawkishness that some people -- specifically, people who are very wrong -- associate with Thornton Wilder’s oft-revived, Pulitzer-winning 1938 play, Our Town.
Our Suburb is Cloud’s riff on Wilder’s classic in the way that Aaron Posner’s Stupid Fucking Bird was a reworking of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, only she isn’t debating her source material the way Posner’s thrilling play did. She’s moved the action -- well, “action;” she’s kept Wilder’s sense of life as a sequence of mostly prosaic moments that we are tragically incapable of appreciating -- from the fictitious hamlet of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire in the early years of the 20th century to her native Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, about 75 years later. There we follow three households, alike in rigorously striving dignity: The white Majors, and black Minors, and the Jewish Edelmans.
Read MoreBess, Porgy. Porgy, Bess. Alicia Hall Moran and Nathaniel Stampley.
Yes, it's clearly an insult to DuBose Heyward, who wrote the novel Porgy, and to his wife Dorothy Heyward, with whom he collaborated on the script for a play derived from the novel, that the latest (2011) Broadway version is called The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess, as if the Heywards had nothing to do with the creation of an American classic. But I was still moved past the point of articulate expression by the show when its touring version stopped in Washington Christmas week, as my tongue-tied Washington City Paper review demonstrates.
Because I decided the most honest way to approach the piece -- which was assigned late, for a short run of a show opening on Christmas night, leaving me no time to prepare -- was to cop to the fact I'd never seen Porgy & Bess before, I left myself vulnerable to the accusation I lack the appropriate credentials to review it. That's a question I'll be addressing at length later this month.
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.
