Keith Tittermary - Page 2

Adapting Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is somewhat of a requirement for established theatre companies. There are many versions of the tale from musicals, CGI movies, radio plays, and irreverent comedies. Playwright (and Keegan Theatre Company Member) Matthew Keenan adds his version to the litany of adaptations and does so with a delightful spin in An Irish Carol.

"Dying is easy, comedy is hard". The old adage has been attributed to countless comedians over the years. When a musical comedy attempts to combine comedy and death, the outcome can either be successful (think Monty Python) or fall on its face. Ruthless! The Musical, a 1992 off Broadway campy musical, which opened this week at Creative Cauldron in Falls Church, falls into the latter category. The intermission-less show written by Marvin Laird and Joel Paley has funny bits, and a few memorable songs, but overall the piece, which has had a successful life in regional theater, is just flat. Sure, it spoofs musicals like Gypsy and movies like All About Eve, but the humor is a bit rudimentary and plays more like a bad SNL skit, then a well-polished farce.

Every child has that one stuffed animal that they can't live without. Every parent knows the dilemma of what happens when the toy goes missing and the tantrum that follows. In the opening of Adventure Theatre - MTC's 65th season, Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Musical perfectly describes every parent's worst nightmare: the missing beloved toy.

'Wow! This is amazing!'

The Broadway composer Cy Coleman is completely underrated. His range of musicals stretch from traditional musical (Little Me) to 60's pop (Sweet Charity) to comic operetta (On The Twentieth Century). His greatest triumph is the hard jazz / film noire musical City of Angels. On Saturday night, the DC area professional premier opened at NextStop Theatre in Herndon, Virginia.

In 2006, then Washington National Opera Artistic Director Placido Domingo announced that the Opera would take on their first complete cycle of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). In the subsequent years, the opera produced the first three of the four-some, but not in quick succession. As the opera and the nation suffered an economic downturn, the complete cycle was never realized. Until now.

Brick, the fermenting favorite son in Tennessee Williams' masterpiece, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof says that there are two ways out of life: death and liquor. Brick is trying to escape his life with the latter, while Big Daddy is facing the first. Father and son are so far away from each other that when the climax of the show occurs during the second act, you see the intersection between one who wants to live and one who wants to forget.

David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof is about as well constructed a play as ever written. The simple story revolves around Catherine, a young woman on the eve of her 25th birthday who is dealing with the death of Robert, her mathematician father; the arrival of her precocious sister, Claire; and Hal, a young former PhD student of her father's coming to go through his writings.

When playwright Motti Lerner wrote his controversial play The Admission, no one could have predicted the chain of events that would subsequently occur. From the production's workshop run at Theater J to Studio Theater, to the formation of Mosaic Theater Company, a lot has happened which now culminates in Lerner's latest play After The War, the penultimate production of Mosaic's Voices from a Changing Middle East Festival in their inaugural season.  

A gem of a musical written by The Fantasticks team of Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones with libretto by N. Richard Nash (using his own play The Rainmaker as basis) is about a con man coming into town to 'sell' rain to a drought-stricken, Depression-era Texas town, but winds up creating a miracle along the way. Schmidt and Jones' score is far superior to their tour-de-force The Fantasticks, while Nash's libretto is bit on the sugary side yet it is still a beautiful tale of miracles happening in the most unlikely of places.

One of the many things that Adventure Theatre MTC does right its new gorgeous production of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach is to bring back director Michael Baron to the area. Since Mr. Baron left us a few years ago to take over as Artistic Director at the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma, his exit has a left a hole in the DC Theatre community, as a director who has consistently done great work. I should also point out that this production is being presented as a 'Co-Production with the Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma.'

We spend a lot of time thinking about the end and the beginning, in kind of self-aggrandizing ways. We talk about the miracle of birth and the mystery of death. But, by definition, all of our lives take place in the middle of those two sort of unknowable events, in this great and often unexamined middle.

The Washington National Opera has always been a champion for young artists, both on stage and off. The WNO's American Opera Initiative's premier production of Better Gods is a testimony to that. Composed with ethnical truth by Luna Pearl Woolf, Better Gods is a stirring portrait of a determined Queen who must decide whether she should give up her crown or her soul.

The lyrics to the jazz standard "All of Me" beautifully convey the sentiment of two people falling in love.  But when two actors share a stage kiss it is natural for the oxytocin created in our pituitary glands to manifest and make those feelings intensify, but is it love? Now, take two actors, who are former lovers, and each involved in other relationships share a kiss and those hormonal levels are magnified and can bring out the worst or the best in people.

I was sitting in the Family Theatre at the Kennedy Center and was getting ready to watch Elephant & Piggie' We Are In A Play, and there was a young boy sitting next to me who did NOT want to be there. Crying and screaming, his dad finally took him out, as he calmed down and came back in the show was starting. And for the next 55 minutes, he sat mesmerized at the stage. That is the magic of live theater.

If you are a child at Christmas time, getting a lump of coal in your stocking is probably the worst gift that you could imagine. However, if the lump of coal is in the form of Erin Weaver's electrifying performance in Lump of Coal, currently playing at Adventure Theatre - MTC, then you got the perfect gift.

One In The Chamber, being presented at the Mead Theatre Lab, does attempt to politicize this issue, or attempt to come to a resolution. Rather, the play (first produced last fall in Los Angeles), shows the aftermath of one of these families in a raw and gritty production.

To say that 'Dust to Dust' at the Fringe Festival leaves me speechless is an understatement. Dumfounded, awestruck? I'm usually not at a loss for words but these wunderkinds have done it to me. This must see event of the Fringe Festival is written, directed and starring all recent Fairfax County high school students. I, for one, was astonished when I learned this after the show. I knew the actors were young, but had no idea that these talented young adults poured their heart, soul, and amazing talent into this.

Part of the beauty of the Fringe Festival is getting to see works you wouldn't normally think of seeing. At this year's Fringe, Burlesque Classique presents their latest fringe offering, 'Vaudevillian Romp'.

There is a humorous Venn diagram that shows that art is the intersection between absolute narcissism and crippling self-doubt. In the new musical 'How To Quit Your Day Job' playing as part of the Capital Fringe Festival, the title premise follow four 'generation inbetweeners' as they navigate through their own self-doubt and a little bit of narcissism.