Roger Catlin - Page 14

MetroStage is starting to wind down its lockdown era with a second streamed work of Terrence McNally, the esteemed American playwright who himself died of COVID complications a year ago.

Ford's Theatre will forever be tied to the legacy of Abraham Lincoln who was assassinated there 156 years ago this week. So amid a lingering pandemic, the otherwise closed stage is offering a radio version of a work it commissioned nine years ago to coincide with the opening of the theater's Center for Education and Leadership.

The third of the Kennedy Center’s six online Performances for Young Audiences this spring is a musical one — and one that can be enjoyed by a much wider age range.

This is the 50th anniversary year for Philadelphia International Records, the outfit founded by Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff that gave us, among many other things, 'TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia), the ebullient instrumental by MFSB, given life as the theme of 'Soul Train' and used to great effect once more in the Round House Theatre's online production of 'A Boy and His Soul.'

As we enter the second year of pandemic, theater companies have largely shifted from live performance spaces to film and video producers. When new work is offered, it streams online, often created by the artists themselves.

A strong cast and steady pace make this rare performance of Shaw's first hit work a worthwhile free tune-in.

Jordan Friend of 4615 Theatre Company talks about his 'Old Soul,'an interactive Zoom call concert and monologue with real time audience feedback

Reliving the effects of one deadly plague era during another one, which contributed to the death of its celebrated playwright Terrence McNally last year.

The original cast of a local favorite returns to animate a long Christmas Eve in a Dublin pub, in a production marred by its indifferent online presentation.

Craig Wallace returns for his fifth season as Ebenezer Scrooge in a production that's a tour de force in sound design.

The third online production in the series, and the second from Kennedy’s Alexander Plays, is a penetrating, seemingly straightforward tale of mid-20th century discrimination in academia, blended with unspeakable crime.

As the astronauts of the SpaceX Dragon must be learning currrently, in their mission to the International Space Station, this battered planet may not the greatest place to be right now. So it is with the Black in Space collective who proclaim to have shot off to a new galaxy 'far, far away from Planet Earth and the Rona' to set their new production The JookJOYnt currently streaming from the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

The big drama about The GALA Hispanic Theatre's season opener 'El Perro del Hortelano (The Dog in the Manger)' is that they're presenting it at all.

If you were planning the first in-person performance in the Kennedy Center in six months, a kind of historic cultural awakening after the darkness of the pandemic lockdown, you couldn't go wrong with a double bill of Renée Fleming and Vanessa Williams.

When Eugene Rogers became the fifth artistic director of The Washington Chorus in February, he wasn't counting on the worldwide pandemic to explode every plan just weeks later. Presenting a 200-person choir, shoulder to shoulder, mouths open was out of the question, even if they were emitting a glorious sound.

Theater suffered a huge loss this week when the playwright Terrence McNally died at 81, of complications of our current plague, the coronavirus. It was a sad irony since many of McNally's plays dealt with the effects of a previous plague, AIDS, in the 1980s.

It may have been unrealistic to open a new play amid the coronavirus pandemic, but 'The Realistic Joneses' did just that on Saturday at Spooky Action Theatre, a group whose name inspires no further confidence (it's named after Einstein's term for quantum entanglement - the ability of separate objects to share a condition at a distance).

Tennessee Williams, in his lifetime, wrote more than 70 one-act plays - some just sketches, many that went unpublished until after his death in 1983 at 71.

Bad haircuts can be tragic, but none more so than for Samson, the Biblical figure whose strength was sapped the moment his mullet was gone. The treacherous shearing by a revenge-seeking Delilah launched centuries of retelling, including Camille Saint-Saëns' opera 'Samson and Delilah' which the Washington National Opera is currently presenting at the Kennedy Center in repertoire with 'Don Giovanni.'