As topics go, you couldn't pick a more immediate one than race in America. And as cities go, Washington is an apt location for a production of Lydia R. Diamond's SMART PEOPLE. It's set during the Obama era and takes on the topic of race with biting comedy. Seema Sueko directs a new run at Arena Stage, featuring a four-person cast that is combustible and exciting to watch.

I witnessed a stellar and - dare I say - pretty flawless production that completely and utterly immersed me into Alison Bechdel's world.

If you've ever dreamed of seeing Lin-Manuel Miranda collaborate with Daft Punk, Pointless Theatre's .d0t:: A ROTOPLASTIC BALLET may be the closest you'll get. Heavily inspired by Italian futurist artist Fortunato Depero, the show incorporates masterful puppetry, visuals like a pop-up book brought to life, and clever hip-hop musical verses written and delivered by Navid Azeez. It's a lot of ideas wrapped up in one experience, but they cohere beautifully.

Featuring a cast of seasoned veteran actors working beside some of the DC-area's most gifted young performers, Theater J offers a sublime take on Neil Simon's semi-autobiographical look at growing up poor and horny in Depression era Brooklyn. Through the lens of nostalgia, Simon's 34 year-old play is like a valentine to a hard-scrabble upbringing sprinkled with humor, rather than the laugh riot of THE ODD COUPLE or the later RUMORS.

On Friday, April 7 at 8:00 PM, Maestro Luke Frazier and the American Pops Orchestra will celebrate popular music of the 1980's with a concert entitled 'You Spin Me 'Round: An 80's Dance Party' at George Washington University's Lisner Auditorium in Washington, DC. To get DC audiences ready for the party, vocalist Patrice Covington shared some of her favorite 80's songs with BWW.

Most of us know the story of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid from the Disney animated feature and subsequent stage musical adaptation. What people forget is how dark the original story is and how a Caribbean crab and an absent-minded bird are not elements of the original story.

Sometimes a theatrical presentation doesn't need much to make its statement. In the case of world-renowned Director Peter Brook's Battlefield, all you need to make an impact is a strong acting company and some bamboo pieces placed strategically on the stage of the Kennedy Center's Family Theater as part of the center's Spotlight on Directors series.

The National Symphony Orchestra's (NSO) Principal Pops Conductor Steven Reineke has always put together musical programs that are fun and classy. This Sophisticated Ladies: 100 Years of Ella and Company, which played this Kennedy Center's Concert Hall this past weekend, was no exception.

An aural and visual feast, TO SAIL AROUND THE SUN is wonderfully inventive and will hopefully set the stage for similar multidisciplinary programming in the future.

Anglo-Kuwaiti writer-director Sulayman Al Bassam's new play PETROL STATION is as of-the-moment as it gets. Drawn from politics, literature, and myth, it features Muslim characters and is densely packed with urgent themes: justice for migrant workers, autonomy for women, cyclical violence. Epic set and lighting design (Eric Soyer) conjure a windswept desert in an imagined borderland torn by civil war, a dramatic backdrop that enhances the actors' delivery of poetic lines. 

'May lost souls find salvation' is the tagline of Scena Theatre's production of Conor McPherson's modern Irish play THE NIGHT ALIVE. Any lost souls wandering into this production will find it worth seeing for its superb Irish actors, Barry McEvoy and Brian Mallon, alone. They're also likely to find salvation in a story that elevates the everyday to heavenly heights.

Theater Alliance's production of Mnemonic, directed by Colin Hovde, is not just a story of migration, but of who we are as humans.

Sulayman Al Bassam is returning to the Kennedy Center next week for the first time since 2009. The international playwright and director has had his work performed around the world, but this is the first time he will be using an all-American cast instead of his usual Pan-Arab troupe.

Co-directed with precision by Christina A. Coakley and Susan Marie Rhea, Keegan's PARADE keeps the staging simple and imaginative, cutting away clutter and using only the barest of props and scenic elements to help the story unfold. No one who has seen previous Keegan musicals, such as HAIR, CABARET, or AMERICAN IDIOT could be surprised by the quality of this rendering of PARADE; I fully expect this production to be recognized multiple times when the next round of Helen Hayes Awards comes around.

Kids are bombarded with big flashy images in pretty much every form of entertainment nowadays. Those of us that grew up with theatre for young audiences (TYA) companies such as New Jersey's Pushcart Players remember how storytelling used to drive the production as opposed to spectacle driving the story. For those of you that want to introduce your children to a kinder and gentler piece of theatre, get over to the Kennedy Center this weekend for Grug and the Rainbow as presented by Windmill Theatre Co from Adelaide, Australia.

RAGTIME, currently playing at Ford's Theatre, hits a number of current, resonant themes across multiple notes with powerful ballads and a stellar cast. DC audiences, this is the show we need right now.

All in all, I certainly commend Arena Stage, including Artistic Director Molly Smith, for taking a chance on this new work. Unfortunately, there's a ways to go to ready it for an audience, particularly here in DC where there is bound to be at least a handful of people with a pretty good understanding of the subject matter.

Inspired by (but not literally adapted from) Mary Shelley's 200-year-old novel Frankenstein, Idris Goodwin's FROM THE MOUTHS OF MONSTERS makes a powerful world premiere at the Kennedy Center's Family Theater. A two-actor play starring Shannon Dorsey and Tia Shearer in energetic, flexible roles, it sports a cool, contemporary aesthetic and impeccable sound design (Christopher Baine) - important for a play that's all about a teenager's discovery of the weight of words.

Clare Barron's apocalyptic play BABY SCREAMS MIRACLE is, fundamentally, an interesting and exceptionally written exploration of the forces of religion and of nature on one small town American family dealing with its own kind of inner turmoil. A uniformly strong cast under the direction of Artistic Director Howard Shalwitz brings out the best of the already strong script at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company.

Albee's characters are shockingly volatile. They curse, they drink and they revel in inflecting pain. It's funny, heartbreaking and yes, slightly familiar. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? may have debuted in 1962 but the truth it provokes still feels relevant.

Keegan Theatre's world premiere play Mack,Beth teaches us a few things about how not to do a modern adaptation of William Shakespeare's Scottish play.

The Hard Problem is the brainchild of Czechoslovakian-born British playwright Sir Tom Stoppard. Contrary to all scientific intelligence, Hilary clings to the mysterious. In the spirit of the scientific method, the audience must as: but why? As Dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen notes so concisely, “the tension between knowledge and mystery pervades the play.”