Louis Lovett is a teller of stories. From Ireland he is and he is simply grand. I have it on good authority from two smallish people and one not so smallish I met at the Kennedy Center last …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:26AM[SHARE]Henrik Ibsen shocked the world with the psychological portrait of a female "monster of unsexed depravity" in his Hedda Gabler and cemented his reputations as the father of modern drama, in p…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:34PM[SHARE]Friday morning, images across TV screens and in The Washington Post flashed pictures of wildfires burning in the oil fields of Alberta, Canada. For those of us this past week who have lived …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:02PM[SHARE]Projections follow music and carry us from clouds to forest canopy. But how quickly the woods change to a panorama of deforestation. Magnificent trunks become denuded logs and are carried by…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:33AM[SHARE]"Nun zäume dein Ross, reisige Maid!" ("Mount your horses, cavalry maiden!") We're in for a ride! Zambello's big pre-show announcement on opening night of The Valkyrie was that Christine Goe…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:27AM[SHARE]In the darkened Kennedy Center Opera House, the music begins so quietly one thinks maybe it is only imagined. But that E-flat major triad rolls on and grows. On an enormous screen, from a mu…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:49AM[SHARE]Renée Fleming walks on stage and shares confidentially that when she isn't jetting to the glamorous capitals of the opera world or singing the great soprano roles on stage, she is making tr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:11AM[SHARE]April turns out to be an "epic" month in the city. This week Washington National Opera opens its much-anticipated full "Ring Cycle" by Richard Wagner, and Constellation Theatre, the c…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 03:22PM[SHARE]Francesca Zambello is directing Wagner's Ring Cycle that opens April 30th at The Kennedy Center and brings to Washington National Opera for the first time the whole four-part epic oper…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:15PM[SHARE]Kennedy Center's World Stages is what I might call a rolling festival of international works that defy easy categorizing of genres, and no show more so than The Odyssey: from Vietnam …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:33AM[SHARE]Many people taking their seats for the first time at WNO's Lost in the Stars may wonder at the production's stark and formidable stockade, lit but darkly. The leader of the Chorus enters and…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:56AM[SHARE]Following the plinkety-plinks of a somewhat less-than-shimmering overture " after all, it is a "junk yard" gamelan " delicately carved puppets transport us through their shadow play. Â All…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:00AM[SHARE]Washington National Opera’s Better Gods brings a mostly unknown chapter in Hawaiian history onto the stage at the Kennedy Center, telling the story of Queen Lili'uokalani, the is…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:21AM[SHARE]I continue to celebrate the voices and the productions that were heard in Washington this Fall as part of the Women’s Voices Theater Festival. Frankly, I'm also still mulling over the …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:48AM[SHARE]There's much to learn watching a production being remounted by essentially the same team. The riches and new challenges proved fascinating in the rarity of Vivaldi's Catone in Utica that pla…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 12:44PM[SHARE]Flute, fiddle, and guitar sounds emanate from a corner tucked in the wings of the Folger stage setting up a kind of folk music-and-theatre production style. Suddenly the stage world grows da…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:07AM[SHARE]Philip Glass has been called by some the greatest living composer. His new work, Appomattox, received a world premiere in its expanded and revised state by Washington National Opera on S…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:03PM[SHARE]Â Women's rituals, eco-spirituality, shamanism, and Celtic wisdom are the themes in Sandra Kammann's self-produced offering for the Women's Voices in Theater Festival. The unabashed celebr…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 10:01AM[SHARE]There is a Carmen for everyone. This production of Georges Bizet's opera is from South African townships around Capetown welded by the most spirited Isango Ensemble. They have made the work …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:08PM[SHARE]On October 13th, we were treated to the debut of a bold new work, visually stunning and emotionally powerful. Yaël Farber has conceived, adapted and directed a fitting "crown" to the Wome…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:33PM[SHARE]Pulsing music from a string quartet becomes a cinematic soundtrack to footage of green water swiftly flowing. The images change to handlebars while on stage a seated man pedals the air, the …
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:38AM[SHARE]We are in full swing of the Women's Voices in Theatre Festival with some mighty impressive entries having led out of the gate. We have Artistic Director Molly Smith in great part to thank fo…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 01:10PM[SHARE]If opera is meant to be a true synthesis, bringing together the many art forms of music, singing, dance, acting, and the visual arts, then Washington National Opera's Carmen has created a sm…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:42AM[SHARE]As the title of one of last of Mozart's operas suggests about women, "so do they all," indeed! How perfect then to set this young lovers' romp in the hedonistic, cynical and self-referential…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:59PM[SHARE]NextStop Theatre Company presents Cole Porter’s classic American musical Kiss Me Kate as the first show in its third professional season. Already, the company has produced several poli…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:15PM[SHARE]It takes only a few seconds of flickering light to find oneself anticipating the delicate magic of the early film animation of Lotte Reiniger. And then musician Tom Teasley intervenes, launc…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 02:07PM[SHARE]I interviewed Eric Owens, the world-renowned bass-baritone, in the beautiful surroundings of Glimmerglass Festival. He had just come off a performance of Verdi's Macbeth two nights before an…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 11:48AM[SHARE]On this the fortieth anniversary of the Glimmerglass Festival, Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has delivered to us two big valentines of shows: Mozart's much beloved work The Magic Flut…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 09:19AM[SHARE]The general understanding in theatre is that there is a curse on Shakespeare's Scottish play. I wonder in Anne Bogart's new operatic production at Glimmerglass Festival, despite some wonderf…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:03AM[SHARE]There is something very special about attending the premiere of a great work, where all discoveries happen in real time. Saturday evening the energy was electrifying, filled with gasps and e…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:57PM[SHARE]Two giants were in fulsome display at Glimmerglass Festival on Saturday, both alike in dignity: the notorious RBG (Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) and Roman Republic's own Cato th…
SOURCE: DC Theatre Scene at 08:57PM[SHARE]
