Screens will be lighting up all over Metro DC as theater lovers, supporters, and luminaries gather online for the 2020 Helen Hayes Awards Friday, September 25. The red carpet unrolls at 6 pm…
When COVID-19 first struck last winter, most of us in the theater world"audiences as well as those on or off stage"thought the crisis would end in a couple of weeks. No such luck. Theaters, …
 When Joy Zinoman"the doyenne of DC theater and founder of Studio Acting Conservatory"describes the training center's new home as a "sacred place," she's not exaggerating.   "Th…
When Jordan Friend, the highly inventive founder of 4615 Theatre Company, invited me to attend a rehearsal of Museum 2040 a few weeks ago, I jumped at the opportunity. The show, billed as an…
"I've never laughed so hard in rehearsal," said Nick Olcott, describing some of the antics performed by a tiny but talented cast " four actors in 48 roles " in the wickedly funny send-up of …
When Laura C. Harris bursts onto the stage in Silent Sky at Ford's Theatre, she is Henrietta Leavitt"hoop skirt and all"fresh out of college, brimming with confidence, and determined to find…
You don't have to read Ulysses"or, for that matter, know anything about James Joyce, its author, or Leopold Bloom, its hapless hero"to love Bloomsday. The play, a gentle romance now blossomi…
"Read the book. But see the play first!" That's what Hend Ayoub"the actor who plays Mariam, the empowered first wife of A Thousand Splendid Suns"told me about the show, now in its first DC r…
Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World"the award-winning play now enjoying its DC debut at Mosaic Theater"is as delicious a romp as any that's come along in a while. Billed as a romantic c…
There's no doubt about it. Eureka Day is a very funny play. The show, now having its DC debut at Mosaic Theater, features five perfectly-attuned actors, a director who understands comedy, a …
There's a lovely new play at Arena Stage, but you'll have to rush if you want to see it. That's because the play"Ken Ludwig's Dear Jack, Dear Louise"will be off and running before the year e…
If the notion of compressing 900 years of Irish mythology into a single two-hour show sounds like a lot to take on, that's because it is. In fact, tackling the entire pantheon of Irish legen…
When Fiddler on the Roof opens at the National Theatre next week, the village of Anatevka"the fictional setting for one of the most successful Broadway musicals in history"will not be the sa…
When Susan Rome bats her eyelashes"as she often does in Edward Albee's Occupant, now at Theater J"she becomes Louise Nevelson, the iconic sculptor whose life and work were inseparable. The l…
Villainy takes many forms. And Ian Merrill Peakes " now plotting revenge against a gifted rival in the Folger Shakespeare Theatre's production of Amadeus " has played more than a few. His mo…
Storytelling is a gift. And Conor McPherson"the Irish playwright, screenwriter and long-time 'bad boy' of the British stage"is one of the most gifted tale-tellers ever known. His Port Author…
Henry IV Part I, which opened at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre last week, is superb. (Click here for DCMTA's review.) This production, starring Ed Gero, is equal to any I've seen. In fact, …
More than 50 seniors crowded into a storytelling circle inside one of the Kennedy Center's new REACH buildings on Monday, and I, as a card-carrying member of the reduced-fare generation, squ…
First, the bad news. Enron, the farcical, scary and all-but-unbelievable romp through the biggest fraud in corporate history, has closed. The good news is that there's still time"four more p…
Although it sounds serious on the surface, Lynn Nottage's Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine, is one of the funniest plays ever to grace a DC stage. That's the opinion of my colleague…
Ann Richards, the late governor of Texas, and the first woman in that state to be elected in her own right would be howling with glee if she could see the pandemonium unleashed in government…
"Heaven is so boring." That's the complaint of a modern-day version of Dante Alighieri in Inferno the Musical, a look at the vagaries of life and love and the inevitability of fate. Written …
There's plenty of beef in Carolann Valentino's one-woman musical, If These Balls Could Talk, about her life as a young actress from Texas working at a steakhouse in New York. This was no…
Whenever Erick Acuña is asked to play Peruvian music, he launches into a burst of rock. Why not, he wonders, since rock is his country's favorite sound. But rock is not what his hosts …
Set in a blighted corner of Wales, Iphigenia in Splott is a breathtaking one-woman show, imported from the UK and written by Gary Owen, a Welsh playwright and winner of the Meyer-Whitworth A…