Bandleader Joe Enroughty is known for leading two swing bands in the Virginia region. As suggested by the band's name, his fourteen-piece Royal Virginians perform and promote the sweet-swing…
For the past year, the National Edgar Allan Poe Theatre on the Air has been creating brief, monthly audio plays based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Each audio play frames the story …
There are flutes "with trumpets blaring in . . . What a clashing, what a clanging,/ What a drumming, what a piping." Thus reads one of Heinrich Heine's poems, set to music with 15 other shor…
 Theatre aficionados are accustomed to the phrase "Dinner and a Show" to mean an enjoyable evening at a dinner theatre. For our purposes now,  "Dinner and a Show" is the title of Big …
"How sad that Mozart, passionate as he was, keenly alive to all the beauties of the world, and full of the highest aspirations, never knew peace and contentment, in spite of all that he enjo…
In Voltaire's picaresque and satirical 1759 novel "Candide," Candide and company make their way to El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. In 1849, at the peak of the California Gold Rush, Ba…
On July 3, the eve of U.S. Independence Day, the Eric Felten Jazz Quartet appeared at the Blues Alley Jazz Supper Club in Georgetown. The event showcased the swing music culture of the Secon…
Charles Dickens is known as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, yet his interest in the theatrical is less widely known. During his later years, Dickens would take to the …
An unusual operetta was to have been performed this month by the Rockville-based Victorian Lyric Opera Company " "El Capitan" by John Philip Sousa, an exotic romance by America's "March King…
 The monthly podcast series (heard on Baltimore's WYPR and by Podcast on NPR) by the Poe Theatre on the Air is developing an excellent reputation, for it is not only dramatizing the famo…
 The television serial "Dark Shadows" originally aired between 1966 and 1971. The show was essentially a soap opera, but one with an unusual twist. Rather than following the tangled live…
 "The Rise of King Asilas" is a fascinating, thought-provoking, audio series currently in its third season. The brainchild of JV Torres, who writes and stars as King Asilas, the show rec…
John Steinbeck on an Elizabethan stage? Blackfriars Playhouse, a recreation of a venue of Shakespeare's time in Staunton, Virginia, shows how well this can work in its current production of …
"What clang was that, and doleful song,/ And rush of raven's wing?" " Gottfried August Bürger, "Lenore" How does one continue an up-and-coming dramatic radio series in the era of quaran…
At Blackfriars Playhouse, we are nearing the end of its traditional Actors Renaissance Festival, in which the troupe of actors at the American Shakespeare Center stages a series of plays wit…
Both the United States and Britain are currently "locked down" due to the COVID-19 coronavirus. With theatres on both sides of the Atlantic now closed due to public health concerns, the fabl…
As several theatres are now streaming performances due to the pandemic, Washington's Folger Theatre is following suit, but with a difference:Â The Folger is streaming its older production…
A new radio horror series has developed based on the works of the Romantic Era writer Edgar Allan Poe. Appropriately enough, the show is produced and recorded in Baltimore, which was hom…
"The Avengers" was a campy English 1960's television spy series and is still remembered fondly today. While the show clearly placed itself within the James Bond 007 spy-thriller genre, "The …
"Anything Goes," courtesy of the Good Shepherds Players. The Cole Porter musical "Anything Goes" was to have run two weekends in March at Good Shepherds Players, part of the annual tradition…
"The show must go on!" So runs an old dictum in the theatre world, but how do theatre companies survive and thrive in the era in which we find ourselves? Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, V…
Bel Cantanti's world premiere production of "Briscula the Magician" is magical indeed; it combines modernistic, often atonal, operatic music with political observations about the past which …
The Puppet Co.'s current production of "Beauty and the Beast" is not a recreation of the 1991 Disney animated version, and there are no enchanted teapots and candlesticks to make childre…
During the Romantic Age, composers in the German-speaking world set to music many of the era's greatest poems in the German language. An outstanding example is "Dichterliebe," or "A Poet…
In the Mel Brooks' film "The Producers" and the Broadway musical which it inspired, Max Bialystock, an erstwhile top Broadway producer, and Leo Bloom, a tax accountant living the kind of…