Tag Archives: theater

On Criticism

Posted on May 22, 2012 | 3 Comments

Critic/profilie writer par excellence Ken Tynan in 1966. Item No. 11 on my list should’ve been “Don’t smoke.”

So on Sunday evening I had the pleasure of talking with a dozen or so very smart high schoolers enrolled in the Shakespeare Theatre Company‘s Young Critics Program. They’ve seen and written about every show in the STC’s season this year, and heard from several other guest speakers. The invitation suggested a few topics and said I should be ready with material enough to speak for 30 minutes, with some additional time after that for questions and discussion. They wanted some basic biographical stuff and some inside-baseball stuff about writing for newspapers, but the part I was most interested in talking about is the basic set of principles I try to use when I write criticism.

I made notes. Since I already went to the trouble of typing them, I’d like to share them here.

I should acknowledge I’ve lifted at least a few of these from a talk my pal the great film critic Michael Phillips, currently of the Chicago Tribune, gave during an NEA fellowship I took part in in Los Angeles in 2009. Hail and thank you, Michael Phillips.

Also, please bear in mind I was trying to make my comments appropriate for an audience of precocious ninth-through-12th-graders. So people much smarter than I am, in other words.

Here’s what I said to them. Continue reading →

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How the Pest Was Won: On Posner’s The Taming of the Shrew

Posted on May 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

WEST PRACTICES: Danny Scheie, Cody Nickell, and Kate Eastwood Norris (Jeff Malet)

In Deadwood’s poetically vulgar patois, Aaron Posner’s Deadwood-inspired new The Taming of the Shrew at the Folger Theatre is “beholden to no human cocksucker.” I review it in today’s Washington City Paper, available wherever finer alt-weeklies are given away gratis. Continue reading →

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Repast is Prologue: Studio’s The Big Meal, reviewed, plus a Commedia Hamlet and a pair of Shavian sex comedies

Posted on May 4, 2012 | Leave a comment

Chris Genebach and Hyla Matthews in Studio Theatre’s THE BIG MEAL. (Carol Pratt)

With three reviews in today’s City Paper, you’d think all I did last weekend was go to plays*. Besides Studio’s wonderful production of Dan LeFranc‘s The Big Meal, I saw Faction of Fools‘s Commedia take on Hamlet, repurposed as Hamlecchino, Clown Prince of Denmark. Plus a Shavian two-fer from Washington Stage Guild. Continue reading →

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We Get to Carey Each Other: Arena Stage’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, reviewed

Posted on April 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

The maid isn’t young or buxom in Arena’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, in defiance of Eugene O’Neill’s famously specific casting specs, but Helen Carey‘s unforgettable performance as Mary Tyrone makes it worthwhile.

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You Was My Brudda, Charlie, You Shoulda etc., etc.: On the Waterfront, the play, reviewed

Posted on April 6, 2012 | Leave a comment

I reviewed the American Century Theater’s production of On the Waterfront — not exactly a straight adaptation of of the Oscar-winning 1954 film written by Budd Schulberg and directed by Elia Kazan, but one of the several, separate versions Schulberg reworked for the stage beginning in 1995.

This one differs from the film in a few significant ways. Read on.

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Mike Daisey Returns to Woolly Mammoth So People Who Knew Who He Was Back Before That This American Life Episode Aired in January Can Throw Stones at Him If They Want

Posted on March 28, 2012 | 1 Comment

Wait, wait, I'm still apologizing! Don't start the music yet!

Mike Daisey appeared for a one-hour public Q & A session last night at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, the place where his controversial monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was born — or, to use his creepy syntax, “birthed.”

It was an interesting hour highlighted by a fascinating exchange near the end, which I reproduce in my Washington City Paper Arts Desk post about it.

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Pushing Daisey

Posted on March 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

BROOKE HATFIELD/Washington City Paper

More than 3,000 words later, I’m still sorting through my thoughts about what Mike Daisey has done. While I think it’s unfair to compare him to Jayson Blair or Stephen Glass, as many have, I’m still puzzled by my inclination to defend a guy who endangered the reputation of This American Life by lying to Ira Glass and Brian Reed to prevent them from fact-checking his story as thoroughly as they should have.

And yeah, as someone who has been a part of Daisey’s theater audience for years, I guess I could say he lied to me, too. I know a lot of people who paid to see (full disclosure: I didn’t pay for my ticket) The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs feel indignant on those grounds.

I don’t.

I don’t go to the theater for news, any more than I go to a dentist when I need my car serviced. Even when something is billed as “a work of nonfiction,” as this show was, I approach it skeptically. And I don’t consider myself an unusually cynical person. I consider myself to be the kind of person who, after seeing a show or a film or reading something that moves me and deepens my interest in an issue, then consults other sources. Continue reading →

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Do the Fight Thing: More on Sucker Punch, now that I’ve seen it.

Posted on March 9, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sheldon Best & Manny Brown in Studio's SUCKER PUNCH (Scott Suchman)

I did a follow-up to my Washington City Paper feature about the fight choreography in the Studio Theatre’s current U.S. premiere of Roy Williams’s boxing play Sucker Punch after the play had opened, and after the Washington Post had run their subsequent story on the same topic.

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New Jerusalem, reviewed

Posted on March 8, 2012 | Leave a comment

Strain & Tolaydo in Theater J's NEW JERUSALEM.

I’ll just go ahead and admit I hadn’t heard of Baruch de Spinoza, or hadn’t remembered his name from Philosophy 101 a million years ago. But David Ives’s Venus in Fur was, I think, the best play I saw in DC last year, so when I had the opportunity to catch Theater J’s current remount of their 2010 production of Ives’s New Jerusalem: The Interrogation of Baruch de Spinoza, I fairly jumped at the chance.

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The Fight Stuff: Selling the boxing in Studio Theatre’s Sucker Punch

Posted on March 1, 2012 | Leave a comment

Please read my feature in today’s Washington City Paper about the fight direction in Studio Theatre‘s U.S. premiere of Roy Williams‘s Sucker Punch.

It never occurred to me to check into this until I started working on this story, but did you know that there is no Tony Awards category, nor is there, closer to home, a Helen Hayes Awards category for excellence in fight direction? Madness!

If you live in or will be visiting Our Nation’s Capitol on a Wednesday evening, drop me a line and you can come to my boxing class for free just for mentioning this story. You don’t even have to read it, because how would I know? We’re on the honor system here. And only you know if you’re an honorable person or not. Continue reading →

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Hercules in Russia: Fairly strong, considering.

Posted on February 15, 2012 | Leave a comment

Sarah Ulstrup and Ricardo Frederick Evans

I reviewed Doorway Arts‘ world premiere of Allyson Currin‘s play Hercules in Russia for the Washington City Paper. Needs a rewrite, but I think it’s got plenty going for it and I’d like to see how it evolves in subsequent productions.

If you’re curious, Robert K. Massie‘s nonfiction book Nicholas and Alexandra, which helped inspire the play, is available via Google Books. Continue reading →

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Personally — and professionally, come to that — I had more fun with the imported comic illusionism of Elephant Room at Arena (“would look far more comfortable in some ramshackle, claustrophobic space, where its raw aesthetics and ironic sensibility might … Continue reading →

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Posted on February 3, 2012

This production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona had too much U2 in it, even for me.

Posted on January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

Nick Dillenburg & Miriam Silverman, fine actors in a shaky production

Reviewed for the Washington City Paper.

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Legendary art-punk Jon Langford coming this way to sing songs he wrote for Richard Byrne’s new play… in five months.

Posted on January 13, 2012 | Leave a comment

Jon Langford's portrait of Hank Williams

Here’s a little write-up I did about how one of my favorite songwriters who is also one of my favorite visual artists, the great mekon/Waco Brother/etc. Jon Langford has co-written some songs for a new play by DC-based playwright Richard Byrne. Continue reading →

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Bomb Out the Lights: Studio’s Time Stands Still, reviewed

Posted on January 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

Holly Twyford is a wounded photojournalist (SCOTT SUCHMAN)

The Studio Theater has kicked off 2012 right with a fine production of Donald Margulies’s Time Stands Still, a drama about two journalists’ uneasy return to domesticated life after separate injuries send them home from the field.

What I ran out of room to say in my Washington City Paper review is that the book the character played by Greg McFadden starts working on during his convalescence, an examination of the political subtext of horror cinema, sounds an awful lot like Shock Value, the one published by the New York Times’s Jason Zinoman – son of Studio Theater founder Joy Zinoman – last summer. Continue reading →

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You, Narcissus: DC’s theater of theater

Posted on December 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

Christian Conn and Erica Sullivan in VENUS IN FUR. (SCOTT SUCHMAN/Studio Theater)

What was the Number One Topic under consideration by DC theaters in 2011? Why, the theater, of course.

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Decadence, Inc.: Arena’s You, Nero and Signature’s Hairspray, considered.

Posted on December 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Danny Scheie as Nero and Susannah Schulman as Poppaea. (SCOTT SUCHMAN/Arena Stage)

Amy Freed’s You, Nero, is, as I opine in today’s City Paper, a clever play about the limits of art as a humanizing influence. Or maybe the limits of mediocre art as a humanizing influence.

Or maybe it’s about how a bad upbringing can damage you beyond the reach of art’s rehabilitative prowess.

Or mediocre art’s rehabilitative . . . I’m still thinking about this, is the point. Which suggests Freed was successful, even if the ending is kind of a mess. Continue reading →

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Self-Convicted: Lauren Weedman’s BUST, reviewed

Posted on December 9, 2011 | Leave a comment

Not that bust. Grow up.

I wrote about writer/actor/comic/onetime Daily Show correspondent Lauren Weedman’s one-woman-show for the City Paper.

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Hurts So Good: Theater J’s After the Fall, considered.

Posted on November 10, 2011 | Leave a comment

Theater J’s new production of Arthur Miller‘s What? No, it’s not about me; you’re an imaginationless churl merely to suggest it play After the Fall is a staggering work of heartbreaking genius. I reviewed it in today’s Washington City Paper, along with Studio Theater’s busy U.S. premiere of Roland Schimmelpfennig‘s The Golden Dragon, which does Rorschach’s After the Quake, which I liked, one better in the the opaque-animal-metaphor interpretation derby.

As ever, your mileage may vary.

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I’m Told “Little Person” Is the Respectful Way to Refer . . .

Posted on October 21, 2011 | Leave a comment

Kris Medina and Maude Mitchell

. . . to people who display the physical characteristics common to all the male actors who appear in Mabou Mines DollHouse, which is at the Kennedy Center for a brief run this weekend. I wrote it up for the Washington City Paper.

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