82 stories by "Brett Steven Abelman"
An expert piece of craftsmanship, Salvation Road is the kind of drama that is guaranteed to be enjoyed by any who go see it, but nevertheless challenging to recommend. It’s got some st…
If the purpose of Fringe is to directly connect art to people and to find the sublime things that slip through the cracks of the establishment, Wombat Drool may just be the quintessential Fr…
While not considered one the Bard’s richest works or given the most revelatory treatment, The Comedy of Errors makes for ideal picnic blanket theatre in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company&…
Who wouldn’t want to see a lost Charlie Chaplin film? The Tramp’s New World was a screenplay for The Tramp by James Agee which Chaplin declined to produce because he felt, at the…
When a story is forgotten, dropped out of view and from the canon, it may be justly, because it has fallen hopelessly behind the times, or unjustly, because it still has something to give &#…
What would you call the blend of music and genre in UrbanArias’ world premiere Blue Viola? Standard terms like “chamber opera,” “folk opera,” or “comic op…
One of the most sensible approaches to Shakespeare’s problem plays is simply to cut out the problematic parts and zero in on the play’s beating heart. With its long one-act prese…
It’s difficult to come into the middle of something, but, to take a stab at a George Bernard Shaw-like observation, aren’t we all living all our lives having come into the middle…
A tense build-up; a long-anticipated entry; desperate shouting of instructions; begging for supernatural aid; an explosive climax; a satisfied finish. Depicting all the passion of a major ra…
Inside the gorgeous brick edifice of the new Chesapeake Shakespeare Company home in Baltimore rises another brick edifice, this one made out of flat, painted wood but no less impressive. The…
We’re truly blessed to have such sharp talents right here in D.C., who can take a comic strip and whip it up into a classy, pleasant children’s musical seemingly effortlessly. Wh…
Baseball is the all-American blank slate, and Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out draws a dazzling array of ideas, jokes, poetry, meanings and tragedies large and small all over it. It cel…
“At the core, this is about not just entering into someone else’s life, but entering into someone else’s fun.” So says fight choreographer Casey Kaleba, who, along wi…
More the idea of a show than a show itself, RagnaPOP! (or She’s Got the Bomb)is a concept album live on stage. Pete Wright, a longtime area musician and songwriter, has created a song …
Refresh is a kaleidoscope of dysfunction. Don’t look at any of the individual elements too closely – you’ll find they’re just simple, colored blobs – but put th…
This is not one of those times where the typically short Fringe running time is a blessing. Leaving Sage of Blackwell, you wish you could spend another hour in this world, learning about the…
Enter Ophelia, distracted opens June 20 at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop. The word ‘distracted’ did not originally have the meaning you’re familiar with. “We found these…
In this chamber version of Verdi’s classic opera, La Traviata, In Series dispenses with the pomp and melodrama to find the character study waiting underneath. Director Nick Olcott may …
There's a bloody moment in the first act of Faction of Fools' Titus Andronicus that goes way, way too far " and it is a mighty relief. We can almost believe up to that point, despite the han…
Now that the three-part Summit series at Arena Stage has concluded, the agenda is clear: this has been an investigation into the unbalanced social and financial economy of the American theat…
"Shamelessly co-dependent is what we like to say." So Patti Kalil, co-artistic director, describes Pointless Theatre. She is sitting beside a brightly painted backdrop before rehearsal f…
A simple tale about how tales are often more than simple, Carol Wolf's The Thousandth Night at MetroStage is an enjoyable little punch to the gut. The story has a number of characters, b…
A less contentious affair than last month’s Summit , this second of three, "In-Depth Explorations of D.C. Theatre," led by Washington Post critic Peter Marks and hosted by Arena Stage …
A good laugh can lift up the harshest material, and Ann Randolph's Loveland keeps afloat with constant humor despite dealing intimately with death. Ann Randolph, alone in Arena Stage's Kogod…
Although controversy has swirled around the upcoming workshop presentation of The Admission at Theater J, artistic director Ari Roth is is looking beyond it. "The play's the thing," says Rot…
