Roger Catlin - Page 13

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.

By now the world is used to inhumane aberrations like ten-year wars. But back when Homer wrote his epic poem, it was still something to rage about, as he did about the siege of Troy by the Greeks in the Trojan War.

Those people building ambitious commercial haunted houses this month might just call if quits when they see how much they've been outdone by the inventiveness and intent of Synetic Theater's 'Dante's Inferno.'

Music streaming services allow kids these days to put together digital playlists for every mood or activity.

'The Last Schwartz,' a play that's perfectly suited for Theater J, is certainly a familiar trope for its audience: Somebody brings home a non-Jewish women to a solemn family occasion fraught with religious underpinnings.

If Studio Theatre has a go-to playwright, it's been Caryl Churchill, the award-winning British innovator and provocateur, whose season-opening 'Cloud 9' at the theater is as brash and challenging as anything on area stages, and yet was first written over 30 years ago.

New York's UCB Theatre, which grew out of a small group of comics you know in the Upright Citizens Brigade, now contains hundreds of performers you don't know putting on scores of different comedies, sketch shows, online shows and all manner of improv shows at what are now a handful of stages.

The long ride up the elevator to Studio Theater's Stage 4 is certainly rewarded in the regional premiere of Robert Askins' Broadway hit Hand to God.

Summer means camp, and so it is at Theater J, which has been decked out in pine board, nature paintings and signs made of sticks for its closing production of the season, Another Way Home by Anna Ziegler.

With more than 130 different productions being staged over three weeks at 20 different venues, the Capital Fringe festival can be an overwhelming undertaking.

Love it or hate it, the whodunit farce Shear Madness at the Kennedy Center represented D.C. theater for busloads of high school students for nearly 30 years.