Review: NOW CIRCA THEN Closes the Season at Capital Stage
by Courtney Symes - June 25, 2024
Capital Stage is closing out its nineteenth season with a charming story of healing and self-discovery. Now Circa Then by Carly Mensch is a clever blend of worlds: past and present, immigrant and citizen, passion and apathy. In this show, life imitates art and the lines between those worlds blur, en...
Review: TOPDOG/UNDERDOG Rises to the Top at Celebration Arts
by Courtney Symes - June 18, 2024
Celebration Arts’ season of Black Girl Magic continues with its production of TOPDOG/UNDERDOG. Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks became the first Black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for this work in 2002. In 2023 it won the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play....
Review: THE NEWLYWED GAME Wins at B St. Theatre
by Courtney Symes - June 15, 2024
I’m old enough to remember when “The Newlywed Game” was live on television…before reruns. It was fascinating to discover how well couples knew each other; so, when the B St. Theatre announced their production of The Newlywed Game, the winner of the 2023 New Comedies Festival, I knew it was going to ...
Review: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at Big Idea Theatre
by Courtney Symes - June 14, 2024
‘Tis the season for Shakespeare! Big Idea Theatre is now showing their gender-bending version of Much Ado About Nothing, just in time to celebrate Pride. This modernized take is playing through June 29th....
Review: Come On Along to 42ND STREET at Broadway At Music Circus
by Courtney Symes - June 13, 2024
Glamour, glitz, and gams galore! You’ll get this and more with 42nd Street, which opens up the 72nd Broadway at Music Circus season. This love letter to Broadway actually didn’t start there. It took over forty years after the film was released to be made into a Broadway musical. It made its debut at...
Review: THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO at Freefall Stage
by Courtney Symes - June 11, 2024
Long before Walt Disney, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio entertained children in a weekly Italian magazine. In 1883 it was turned into a novel and has since inspired many adaptations, including the play currently running at Freefall Stage. The True Adventures of Pinocchio, adapted by Louis Lippa, is showi...
Review: THE GOAT is Brilliant Comedy at The Stage At Burke Junction
by Courtney Symes - June 08, 2024
Edward Albee, whose odd middle-aged characters have fascinated American theatre-goers since 1962’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, explores what is perhaps his most interesting family dynamic in the 2002 Tony Award-winning play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? The play is, as you might imagine, about a ...
Review: THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM at Black Point Theatre
by Courtney Symes - May 15, 2024
Death becomes her…I think. Or maybe it becomes him. Someone might be dead. Or not. Florian Zeller’s The Height of the Storm leaves many unanswered questions at the Black Point Theatre, ones that I’m not sure I will ever understand. I suppose that’s the point, as Zeller said, “…For me the theatre is,...