Initiation To Wolf Trap
No sejourn in the Washington DC area can be considered complete without a visit to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, I'd heard on many occasions in the past.The open air, woo…
No sejourn in the Washington DC area can be considered complete without a visit to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, I'd heard on many occasions in the past.The open air, woo…
The Athenaeum must be one of the loveliest hidden delights of Boston. I went there over the weekend while I was in town recording an episode of VoiceBox about street musicians with my friend…
As I wandered around The Phillips Collection's monthly evening "party", it struck me, as it so often does at these things, that the formula is getting tired.The milling around, the live band…
Thomas Choinacky likes Kate Winslet. A lot.In Thomas Is Titanic, the solo performer's sweet, self-absorbed show at DC's Capital Fringe Festival, Choinacky shows us the inner workings of an o…
The Library of Congress is consistently giving me more to snack on during my lunch breaks than mere sandwiches and coffee. I get food for thought here on a regular basis. Right now, I am sit…
As an arts journalist who covers a very broad spectrum of musical genres, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the etiquette that surrounds the start times of various different …
With Beertown, The Washington DC-based ensemble theatre company Dog & Pony has created a theatrical universe that is so compelling and inclusive that one barely notices two and a half ho…
The year was 2006 when Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, a musical about the United State's bullish seventh president was first developed.The piece was workshopped by the New York-based experime…
July in Washington DC is the perfect month for a Fringe Festival. It's unbearably hot and muggy outside and much more blissful to be indoors experiencing weird and wonderful performances.I a…
The picture to your left shows a bunch of Washington DC Fringe Festival audience members reenacting a scene from a children's book about human reproductivity.The people in the photo, which I…
One of the great delights of working at The Library of Congress is being able to attend all manner of lectures on marvelously obscure subjects.Yesterday's fascinating jaunt through the cultu…
The Daily Telegraph reports that sales of the Tallis Scholars' recording of Thomas Tallis great, 40-art choral work, Spem In Alium, rapidly rose this week owing to readers of E L James's ero…
The first thing I did after I first landed on the East Coast in 1998 was attend the July 4 celebrations. I was just about to embark upon a fellowship year at Harvard and I have dim memories …
One of the things you don't want to do in Washington DC in July or August is go outside. So it's a good thing that the three buildings of The Library of Congress, where I am currently workin…
Hesperus, an early music trio, rounded out the 2012 Washington DC Early Music Festival by performing a live soundtrack of assorted Medieval European music to a screening of the 1923 movie ve…
I often think that the most satisfying concert experiences follow a narrative arc. And I particularly love it when programmers manage to move an audience from one set of feelings and experie…
It's hard to fault The Scottsboro Boys. The 2010 John Kander and Fred Ebb musical, which is currently running at San Francisco's Geary stage in an arresting co-production between the America…
I've known about the Djerassi Resident Artists Program for quite a while.Carl Djerassi, the scientist-turned-playwright who founded the residencies on his spectacular ranch in the Los Altos …
The San Francisco Opera's company premiere production of John Adams' Nixon in China left me feeling a bit nonplussed on the whole apart from one thing: Hye Jung Lee's performance as th…
It's sometimes the case that I go to the theatre to see a new drama and walk away struggling to figure out where exactly the play lay amid the myriad ideas, words, sounds and images that wer…
Arts journalists should make a point of attending arts events with people under the age of 20. I'm saying this having attended a production of The Magic Flute this week at San Francisco Oper…
OK, so I'm taking back the comment I made yesterday about the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's Shakespeare productions as being sub par.After witnessing director Laird Williamson's gob smacking…
Someone might be forgiven for coming to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and coming to the conclusion that they don't like Shakespeare very much. Part of the problem is the deference th…
My Oregon Shakespeare Festival experience this year is so far proving to be unusual: OK, I'm only three plays in, but never have I been to a theatre festival that produces such polarized res…
My second annual trip to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicked off last night after a seven-hour drive from San Francisco with The White Snake, a world premiere re-telling of an ancient Chi…