Michael Russotto and Joshua Morgan in A BRIGHT NEW BOISE
Woolly Mammoth opens their Apocalypse-themed 32nd season with Samuel D. Hunter‘s surprisingly empathetic comedy A Bright New Boise. My City Paper review is here. I also wrote about Active Cultures’s Halloween trio Hellspawn in this week’s issue, available wherever fine newsweeklies are given away free.
Rachel Zampelli and Alyssa Wilmoth. (C. Stanley Photography)
My review of No Rules Theatre‘s fine production of Diana Son‘s Stop Kiss is in today’s Washington City Paper. Read it here.
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Tagged H Street Playhouse, No Rules Theatre Company, theater, Washington City Paper
Delia Taylor in HAPPY DAYS. Photo: Dru Sefton
My Washington City Paper review of the newly, pun-tastically rebranded WSC Avant Bard‘s production of Samuel Beckett‘s Happy Days is here.
Four years ago I reviewed the National Theatre of England‘s Fiona Shaw-starring production when it played the Kennedy Center.
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Tagged Delia Taylor, Samuel Beckett, theater, Washington City Paper, WSC Avant Bard
And also say other boat things! Boat things ahoy! And/or ho! As appropriate!
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Tagged David Cale, monologues, The Studio Theatre, theater, Washington City Paper
I Wish You Love, a new, original “drama with music” from St. Paul, MN’s Penumbra Theatre tells the tale of how beloved entertainer Nat “King” Cole chose to end his 1956-7 TV variety show, the first primetime network program hosted by an African-American.
Cole dipped into his own pocket to keep it going, and A-list friends like Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis, Jr. and Tony Bennett appeared for scale, but it was no use: With Montgomery Bus Boycott still in effect, no national sponsor would risk paying to bring a black man into America’s homes. When NBC insisted Cole segregate the players in his band, which didn’t even appear on camera, he finally balked. Ironically, lack of a live band is what keeps this show from living up to its considerable potential. It features 20 songs; far too many given that its Cole, Dennis W. Spears, is singing to prerecorded music. And several songs fail to advance or comment upon the story in any resonant way — not necessarily a problem, if Spears can sing the shit out of them. Continue reading
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Tagged Estonia, Nat "King" Cole, Penumbra Theatre, Scena Theatre, Sofi Oksanen, theater, Washington City Paper
Annie Houston, Julie Garner & Cliff Williams III. (Melissa Blackall)
BOBRAUSCHENBERGAMERICA. Another winner from Forum Theatre, whose Last Days of Judas Iscariot was my favorite show of, um… 2008, was it? Reviewed for WCP. Continue reading
Christian Conn and Erica Sullivan whip it good. (Scott Suchman)
“I hate the audition process,” sighed provocateur-playwright David Mamet in a 2005 Los Angeles Times essay. “As an actor, I found it demeaning. As a writer and director, I find it damn near useless.”
It’s David Ives, not Mamet, whose fertile imagination begat Venus in Fur, a wickedly ingenious dark comedy that premiered in New York last year and has now arrived at the Studio Theatre in a new production that preserves its whip-smarts fully intact. But Mamet’s essay, “The Tyranny of the Audition,” could’ve contributed a perfectly descriptive moniker for Ives’s play had the latter not already borrowed the name of a scandalous 19th century German novella about a man who derives sexual pleasure from being abused. (If you already knew that the novella’s author’s name, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, is the origin of the term masochism, go to the the head of the class. And continue down the hall the principal’s office; we’re totally calling your parents.)
Ives’s intelligent design is not a straightforward adaptation of the novella. He presents us instead with a youngish, famous-ish, not-yet-rich theater artiste who’s trying to cast his new adaptation thereof. After a long day’s fruitless search for an age-appropriate, articulate and sexy “actress who can actually pronounce the word ‘degradation’ without a tutor,” playwright-director Thomas is surprised when a woman barges into his shabby studio from out of the rain, all self-flagellating apologies for showing up hours late for an audition he can’t even find on the schedule. He tries to blow her off but you know she’s going to read for him anyway, and if any ladies or actors or lady actors or anybody is getting vapors hearing such a brazen male wish-fulfillment scenario recounted, just you wait. As Vanda pries off her rain poncho to reveal her patent leather (or vinyl?) bondage gear — just wait, I said! — the balance of power between omnipotent creator and helpless actor has already begun its hypnotic migration across the stage. Continue reading
Rachel Beauregard does not actually don boxing gloves in SWAMPOODLE that I can recall, but happily she does sing.
So, Swampoodle. A beautiful mess, is what it is. Bring your ear horn.
Also, I saw Keri Hilson play the 930 Club as the headliner of the WPGC Bithday Bash last Thursday night. The bill also included Lloyd and B.o.B., but my hopes for an all-star version of the Eastern Motors song were dashed.
Last Sunday, I saw The Moscows of Nantucket at Theater J. It’s good. More fun that that Fleet Foxes show, certainly. Continue reading
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Tagged failed experiements, Ireland, movies, Solas Nua, theater, Theatre J, Uline Arena, Washington City Paper
Eric Hissom is emotionally erect. (Carol Pratt/courtesy Folger)
By the power vested in him by nothing more than his wildly protruding ego, Cyrano de Bergerac runs a blowhard actor off the stage at rapier point. So begins the Folger Shakespeare Library’s sparkling and soulful new adaptation of the romantic classic, and of all the outlandish scenarios it demands that leading man Eric Hissom imagine, this might be the most farfetched: As Cyrano, the guardsman of uncommon cheek and uncanny beak, a genius almost as fast with a sword as he is with a quip, Hissom is so effortlessly charming and authoritative it seems impossible he could ever find himself staring down a hostile audience.
He’s so good, in fact, you almost can’t believe that this Cyrano’s inconveniently 3D schnoz would much impede him in romance. But of course, the pickle he finds himself in ultimately has nothing to do with the fleshy cucumber sticking out under his eyes. For Cyrano, the rub is his lack of confidence that he’ll persuade his second cousin Roxane to see beyond her—uh, his—nose, an eloquent and enduring metaphor for the self-doubt that can cripple even the most capable among us. Continue reading
Irakli Kavsadze as King Lear and Ira Koval as Goneril
Now what we’ve got here is a failure to communicate. At least that’s what a smarter-than-me friend of mine says we’ve got in the text. Synetic’s wordless version is an action flick. I like action flicks.
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Tagged King Lear, Shakespeare, Synetic Theater, theater, Washington City Paper
From the University of Maryland's original Joe Louis opera, "Shadowboxer," April 2010.
Boxing! So misunderstood! I hate to keep picking on Golden Boy, but mulling over what rubbed me so wrong about it did me the idea to examine some boxing plays that’ve been performed here in DC and in New York recently. So I did that. And before you tell me, yes, I know that some of the movies Clifford Odets worked on in Hollywood are, for all his agita about selling out, much better than Golden Boy. (The Sweet Smell of Success springs immediately to mind.) Continue reading
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Tagged Aimee Mann, boxing, David Muse, stage fighting, Studio Theatre, theater
Jennifer Mendenhall, Nancy Robinette and Sybil Lines in "The New Electric Ballroom"
My Washington City Paper review is here, along with a complimentary assessment of the Capital Fringe-affiliated Run Through the Unquiet Mind.
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Tagged theatre, theater, Enda Walsh, Studio Theatre, Capital Fringe Festival, New Ireland, Irish theatre
Jefferson A. Russell, Dawn Ursula, Kimberly Gilbert and Cody Nickell will all return in Woolly's summer reprise of the Pultizer-winning CLYBOURNE PARK
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Tagged Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park, Pulitzer Prize, theater, Woolly Mammoth
Mitchell Hébert and John Lescault / photo by Scott Suchman
To frame things as reductively as possible, Yasmina Reza’s Art and Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce are both about two guys reacting to the alarming behavior of a third.
Admittedly, it’s a pretty slim commonality. Dinny, the tyrannical patriarch who runs the show in Walworth, is violent, delusional, sadistic—the very model of a modern major depressive sociopath. Serge, the catalyst of Art, is merely pretentious, dropping 200,000 clams on a painting that appears to his pals, and to us, to be a blank white canvas. “The resonance of the monochromatic doesn’t really happen under artificial light,” he explains, like an emperor protesting that his new clothes need only be brought in a bit.
Serge is a dermatologist by trade. That a surface unperturbed by form or color would call out to his soul is one of the better jokes here, which is to say this is neither the funniest nor the most insightful work ever to win the Tony Award for best play, which it did, or to follow its denouement with a deflating coda, which it does. Continue reading
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Tagged art, Enda Walsh, Ireland, Signature Theare, Studio Theatre, theater, Yasmina Reza
Jeremy Lister and Evan Crump
FURTHER READING (RELATED): Here’s Michael Little‘s fine 2005 WCP feature that inspired Stephen Spotswood to write the play. Fascinating stuff.
FURTHER FURTHER READING (UTTERLY IRRELEVANT): I also capsule-reviewed Ounie Lecomte’s very moving film A Brand New Life, which is on the bill for FilmFest DC, in this same issue.
Woolly’s almost-world-premiere production of Bruce Norris’s now wildly successful race-and-gentrification play, which I fairly raved about at this time last year, is coming back this summer. I muse briefly on why this is a good and welcome thing in the City Paper’s Best of DC issue, on stands this week.
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Tagged Best of DC 2011, Bruce Norris, Clybourne Park, theater, Washington City Paper, Woolly Mammoth
Washington Stage Guild’s production of Red Herring is in fact so much funnier than this photo would suggest.
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Tagged McCarthyism, theater, Washington City Paper, Washington Stage Guild
A slice of 1920s Irish misery from Washington Shakespeare Company, reviewed for the City Paper.
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Tagged Sean O'Casey, theater, Washington City Paper, Washington Shakespeare Company
Here’re my reviews of Keegan’s current two-fer of a recent (1997) Irish play and a brand-new one, Conor McPherson’s The Weir and Rosemary Jenkinson’s Basra Boy, respectively. I was pretty hard on their production of Golden Boy a few months back, so I’m glad these were better.
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Tagged Conor McPherson, Ireland, Keegan Theatre, Rosemary Jenkinson, theater, Washington City Paper
Clockwise from top right: Nancy Robinette, Kimberly Schraf and Holly Twyford
Ford’s Theatre’s The Carpetbagger’s Children features three of Washington’s most revered and accomplished actresses onstage together for the first time, and is exactly as exciting as this publicity photo makes it look. In his review for DCist, my friend Ian found a way of pointing out nicely that nothing happens in this show, at least not that we actually get to see.
I say it less politely in this week’s City Paper, wherein I also take in Taffety Punk Theatre Company’s Owl Moon, which is messier and more fun than the Ford’s show and features a great song by Xiu Xiu that I hadn’t heard before and a talking spirit-owl.
So obviously it wasn’t even a fair fight. Owl Moon of Ga’Hoole, y’all.
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Tagged Ford's Theatre, Horton Foote, Taffety Punk, theater, Washington City Paper
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