Jack L. B. Gohn - Page 2

As the director says, this is a 'Black play that speaks to Black people and talks about Black shit.' But it allows larger audiences a chance to listen in to the conversation and laugh, if more gently, at the jokes. While not everything in the show is funny, much of it is irresistibly so.

You not only have to have the talent to do the technical side of costume drama well, and have actors who can emote convincingly and then (in this case) reverse gears convincingly, and then reverse gears again as many times as the script calls for. You need a script that doesn’t make them do it so often it makes the audience stop following and stop caring. That is a bar this script doesn't clear.

They sure don't write them like Holiday anymore. A play about the foibles of a family of rich White people that supplies no meaningful social or racial context, a critique of the world of wealth which is bafflingly superficial, and a romance almost lacking in visible courtship, playwright Philip Barry's 1928 Broadway hit has very little claim to be produced now. Yet it's given a sumptuous and impressive production by Arena Stage in Washington. Go for the performances, the costumes, and the direction, and you'll be fine. Seek more, and you may be disappointed.

There’s so much to like in Chesapeake Shakespeare Company’s current revival of Twelfth Night, a production that succeeds in big things and small, that I can’t imagine any spectator walking away unsatisfied. What did our critic think of TWELFTH NIGHT at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company?

Dated and flawed as I consider it, Sweet Charity is something of a landmark in the world of the American musical, and this rendition is admirable. And then there are those three big songs. You will definitely experience good times, fun and some laughs.

A well-made, stunning play, about racist mental hospital practices in the not very long-distant past, with four strongly-imagined characters and an explosive ending.

In the end, it is largely the combination of sensitively-selected detail and poetic diction on the one hand, and the big-picture view of various interlocked social problems that makes the show so extraordinary. In that big picture, the problems are too pervasive, too ingrained to surmount, and well-intentioned people trying to escape those problems will probably fail. In the end, the play suggests, we are much more the product of the forces that shaped us than of our own volition.

Babel, which invites us to contemplate a world, apparently in the near future, in which the human genome is so well understood that every person’s – and fetus’s – potential, including the potential for antisocial behavior – is determinable, and if a child cannot be “certified” while in utero as meeting the mandated genetic risk profile, the child will face lifelong legal discrimination thwarting most forms of career accomplishment. Abortion is freely available, and the resulting pressures to terminate pregnancies when a child is not certified are intense, as is the misery of potential parents whose gestating child is deemed uncertifiable, and probably a menace to society. We witness how these dynamics play out with two couples who are friends. Definitely recommended.

The play is an ungodly and irremediable mess, but it does demonstrate the importance of the proposition for which the central character was willing to put his career at risk, i.e., that more care needs to be taken, by industry and government alike, of secrets – their own and everyone else’s.

This is more a theater piece than a play, Caridad Svich's choral meditation on the plight of the earth and the humans who inhabit it.

This is playwright Chisa Hutchinson's their outing at CATF. I liked both of her previous entries, and she continue to wax both original and amusing, without slighting the serious messages she always delivers.

What did out critic think? The essential attribute of the play, the combative romance of Benedick and Beatrice (Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni), is the only truly sacred element of the play. Dylan Arredondo and Anna DiGiovanni, give these principals a full-throated presentation, Arredondo leaning heavily on physical comedy and DiGiovanni on the more cerebral element. In the end, their predicament is that in their merry combat each of them has painted themself into a corner; they need to become lovers but for all their formidable brains neither can do it without the help of friends and a development in the subplot that gives them an excuse to reset their relationship. This problem gives them a delicate palette of emotions to evince: scornful derisiveness, hesitancy, hypocrisy, passion, rueful candor. Arredondo and DiGiovanni serve these changes up charmingly.

Dream Hou$e is awash in ideas, about Latinx identity, about generational wealth transfers, about gentrification, about memory versus history, about personal authenticity, about priorities, about the inherent value of things, about the TV biz, etc., etc., etc. You wouldn’t expect a package of all these things to be tied up neatly in a 90-minute performance, and it’s not. But still, this mishmash is undeniably exciting to experience, and I, along with much of the audience, walked out with a definite buzz on. The kind of buzz you get when you’ve just experienced something exciting and new.

To put the biggest problem in contemporary terms, terms which doubtless occurred to many members of the audience besides just me: Is this a play about Zelensky or is it a play about Putin? You can characterize it as the story of a small army’s gallant victory against a much larger and better-equipped force, or you can talk about it as the story of an unprovoked invasion of a sovereign foreign land in service of an improbable abstract notion of the invading country’s imperial rights.

there's hardly a joke that misfires, hardly a dance step that doesn't thrill, and hardly a song that doesn't connect. It all works together, and the audience will leave utterly sated. Not to miss.

Fires in the Mirror is Anna Deavere Smith's now-classic theatre piece about the Crown Heights, Brooklyn disturbances of 1991, the singular point of which is that it's impossible to know exactly what to think about those events either.

In the oft-repeated words of the character Sandy, sung in a hilarious patter-fest at strategic points in the musical of Tootsie, playing this week only at the Hippodrome, 'I know what's going to happen.' What's going to happen is that you will attend the show and have an uproarious good time.

Let’s stipulate that book writer and lyricist Tom Eyen and composer Henry Krieger were not Sondheim. What they gave us in Dreamgirls was serviceable, not brilliant, the result of a long development process largely aimed at repairing holes in the melodrama. The result: the company that puts on the show has a heavy lift indeed. But I have to say that ArtsCentric proves to have very strong arms.

Building on Adrienne Shelly’s sometimes grimly hilarious and frequently heartwarming 2007 movie of the same name, and realized for the musical stage by Broadway’s first all-female creative team in 2016, Waitress has been almost continuously on Broadway, apart from a COVID break which ended when the show was the first musical to reopen there. With great songs by Sara Bareilles, a strong script by Jessie Nelson, vivid characters, some surprising dance numbers, lots of sexy behavior, and a strong feminist message, there’s little not to like.

Mark Scharf is a master of the 10-minute play, except, perhaps, where he tries to use it to explore large themes.