Roger Catlin - Page 6

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Tennessee Williams, in his lifetime, wrote more than 70 one-act plays - some just sketches, many that went unpublished until after his death in 1983 at 71.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

Write what you know, authors are often advised. And 'This Bitter Earth,' a vivid tale from prolific playwright Harrison David Rivers reflects a partnership between a back writer and a white activist in Minnesota that is very similar to his own.

The week the stock market erases its year's gains may be just the right time to open a not-often produced play about swift changes in fortune.

Walking into the Nu Sass world premiere 'Weep' is like stepping into the living and work space of its characters.

When her husband suddenly dies in a traffic accident, an opera singer mourns, but also wants to get in touch with the organ recipient. Who received the heart of her husband, and did it carry with it more than just the tissue and muscle?

There is certainly a dramatic story to be told behind the highly successful '60s folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, from their brief high school success that got them on 'American Bandstand' to their later 1960s stardom, their love/hate relationship and mutual artistic dependence. All of that is barely mentioned, though, in the nationally touring 'The Simon & Garfunkel Story,' currently in a three show run at the National Theatre.

The traveling ballet works that tend to fill the Kennedy Center Opera House are usually the big, brand name costumed works - 'The Nutcracker,' 'Swan Lake' (a version of which played last week; another is coming in April) and 'The Sleeping Beauty,' which in fact the National Ballet of Canada is doing through Sunday.

If there's a D.C. theater company that would approach presenting James Joyce, it'd be the literary-minded Washington Theatre Guild, which has made its mark by presenting everything written by George Bernard Shaw, among other ambitious projects.

Some of Aretha Franklin's greatest performances happened at the Kennedy Center - chief of which may have been a 2015 performance of '(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman' at the Kennedy Center Honors that made Barack Obama shed a tear in the Presidential box.