Roger Catlin - Page 12

The riveting, ready-made drama of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings animate a new production at the Mosaic Theater Company of DC.

Nilaja Sun sits in the chair, absorbed in herself as the audience at Woolly Mammoth takes its seats for her electrifying one-woman 'Pike St.'

It's a long way from a cramped second-floor loft in lower Manhattan to the splendors of the Kennedy Center Opera House with a full orchestra.

What would have happened if Jay Leno were still hosting 'The Tonight Show' today?

As part of the the Kennedy Center's springtime spotlight on international directors, the first of three works by Palestinian playwrights opened at its Terrace Theatre Wednesday.

Bad singers make interesting stories. After Meryl Streep got an Oscar nomination for her role as the classical world's Florence Foster Jenkins, last year, here comes Broadway's Debra Monk, warbling the pop repertoire of a mid-1960s musical misfit in a new musical full of Great White Way pedigree.

Let's say you want to think deeply about the origins of menstruation. Perhaps you would go to a lecture on evolutionary biology.

Living in Connecticut eight years ago when a chimp being kept as a pet ripped the face off a neighbor, I found it tough to see anything but stark horror in the attack.

The theater space at the Spooky Action Theatre is so intimate you immediately feel you're in the tiny cabin where all its action in Jez Butterworth's play The River takes place.

If the current state of U.S. relations with Russia seems dark and murky, it's opposite that in the Mariinsky Ballet's current offering at the Kennedy Center. The Little Humpbacked Horse is sunny and simple, light-hearted and soaring.

Of the variations of Tchaikovsky's classics that take over the holiday season, Duke Ellington's 'The Nutcracker Suite' is one that's had staying power. The 1960 arrangement with Billy Strayhorn showed an irreverent, relaxed, cool jazz approach, with a sense of humor.

Leave it to the venerable In Series to mark the 100th anniversary of Enrique Granados' rarely heard and even more rarely seen opera 'Goyescas.'

Falstaff had the girth and beard to make for a decent Santa, but Shakespeare never wrote anything close to a Christmas play.

When every theater company feels compelled to do something Christmas-themed come December, it can lead to either overusing certain titles or creating fluffy trifles.

As expected this time of year as TV ads, wreaths and shopping center crowds, 'The Nutcracker' has by now gone beyond being merely a beloved holiday tradition to possibly being the country's most performed work of any type - dance, music or theater. Multiple productions of it appear in dozens of cities year after year and is as much a part of family custom by now as opening presents.

'Tommy,' the groundbreaking 1969 set by the Who that it dubbed a rock opera, finds a new dimension in the Open Circle Theatre production in Silver Spring.

More than 25 years after it was first staged, 'Six Degrees of Separation,' John Guare's sly tale of a young con man captivating and ultimately fooling an upper East Side couple, seems almost like a period piece.

Before ballet stages everywhere become crowded with nutcrackers and their gala holiday accouterments, there is still time for other sturdy folk tales of enchantment set to Russian music and popular with children with which to spin off imaginative ballets.

I wish you could see 'Kiss' at Woolly Mammoth Theatre the way I did: Without a lot of advance insight, no prior research and only the vague knowledge it was an adaptation of a foreign play.

One of the failings of human beings is the hesitance to visit those who have lost loved ones. We wonder about the right thing to say when the actual requirement is to be present and to listen. That's all that's asked of audience members for 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' Joan Didion's adaptation of her own award-winning memoir into a one-woman play, now at Arena Stage.