Pamela Roberts

Leopoldstadt, a weighty and ambitious work by award-winning author Tom Stoppard, is on stage now at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. The modern epic traces a Viennese Jewish family from the zest and promise at the eve of the 20th century, through the devastations of the Great War and the annexation of Austria by the German Reich, to the Holocaust and the tender, broken years after.

Primary Trust is a touching, intimate, and deeply affecting work. The 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winner is making its Washington-area premiere at Signature Theatre in an outstanding production directed by Obie Award winner Taylor Reynolds.

The Shakespeare Theatre Company has opened its 2024-2025 season with a fun, frothy, beautifully rendered Comedy of Errors by the theatre’s “resident playwright” William Shakespeare and directed by the company’s artistic director, Simon Godwin. Godwin layers visual and aural punch to keep the pace lively – including a band of versatile on-stage musician storytellers.

Soft Power at Signature Theatre, is lush and polished, wacky and worrisome, absurdist and cautionary. It’s a tightrope of high political stakes and a zany montage of the US and China. As we head into high season of the 2024 election, the timing is perfect for staging the recently revised musical by David Henry Hwang and Jeanine Tesori.

Rodin Alcerro’s PONDERING ABOUT MY MEMORIES is lush, powerful and deeply moving. Premiering at the Capital Fringe Festival, the play explores past, present and future. Like flecks of glitter in a snow globe, in this production thoughts, memories, and fragments drift peacefully or swirl turbulently and resettle each time in unique new ways.

RE: WRITING is a moving and assured new work at the Capital Fringe Festival. The play delves into trust and memory. It asks who gets to tell your story, it reflects on the ethics of writing, and it looks at how we surface and articulate the major moments of our lives.

At Round House Theatre, director Jamil Jude stages a brilliant, heightened and deeply emotional interpretation of the Suzan-Lori Parks’ work that is as raw and affecting now as it was when it earned Parks a Pulitzer Prize two decades ago.

Creative Cauldron stages a positively effervescent musical, THE BUBBLY BLACK GIRL SHEDS HER CHAMELEON SKIN, a coming-of-age story that ably balances light humorous moments with pointed questions of growing up a Black woman in the latter part of the 20th century.

Signature Theatre’s revival of the groovy Vietnam-era musical HAIR is wildly energetic, colorful, and full of spirit. The cast’s gorgeous voices and exuberance uplift songs that we know as the soundtrack of the times, from the opening “Aquarius” to the final “Let the Sunshine In.”

STOMP is here for a brief five-performance run through April 7 at Capital One Hall in Tysons. In STOMP, anything can be used to drive a beat and set the rhythm. Brooms, trashcans, grocery carts, inner tubes, suitcases – everything including kitchen sinks are objects to play with and explore. Zippo lighters, plastic bags and the performers’ bodies are pressed into action to create surprising and exuberant music.

Horrors! Ford’s Little Shop disappoints. Little Shop of Horrors is a cult favorite with catchy score of rock and doo-wop tunes. But the latest version at Ford’s Theatre underwhelms. The fun has run out.

The Lehman Trilogy, directed by Arin Arbus at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, is an extraordinary feat of storytelling. It is simultaneously epic and spare. With just three actors it unfolds the captivating and intimate story of one immigrant family that evolves its company, navigates pious lives, innovates new ways of doing business, and ultimately unravels over time into instability and a crushing financial crisis.

Tick, tick …BOOM! is a raw and moving semi-autobiographical musical by Rent's Jonathan Larson. The Kennedy Center revisits the work with a spiffy new Broadway Center Stage production directed by Neil Patrick Harris and brings together three of Broadway’s most exciting and award-winning talents: Brandon Uranowitz Denée Benton and Grey Henson.

The Folger Theatre welcomes audiences back to its jewel box theatre with The Winter’s Tale – a story of friendship, betrayal, loss and second chances. With glorious production elements and strong performances, this production reminds audiences of everything that is unique and significant about attending a show at the Folger.

Mosaic Theater Company's production Confederates, by MacArthur “genius” fellow and two-time Tony-nominated playwright Dominique Morisseau, is a smart and moving satire about the struggles of two formidable women who must stand up to subjugation as they consider whom they can trust and how they move forward.

THE CHOSEN at 1st Stage is a fascinating coming-of-age story of two boys and their fathers, and their extraordinarily different Jewish communities located just “five blocks and a world apart.”

Cirque du Soliel’s ECHO, now making its U.S. premiere, is chock full of wonder and spectacle. There’s no CGI or stunt doubles here, these 52 artists amaze with their strength, agility, artistry and precision.

Compagnie Käfig merges elements of hip hop with modern dance, circus, and technological wizardry in its highly innovative production, Pixel, which has been seen by audiences in more than 30 countries around the world.

Seeing To Kill a Mockingbird, now at the Kennedy Center, isn’t the same experience as the novel you were quizzed on in high school or the classic 1962 film. Aaron Sorkin’s script and Bartlett Sher’s direction gain heightened context and nuance from the rise in racial violence in the last decade. The national tour with Richard Thomas as Atticus Finch, which visited D.C. in June 2022, is again at the Kennedy Center though August 27.

Synetic Theater’s wordless Cyrano de Bergerac is gorgeous to behold and packs a powerful emotional wallop.