There are times when I want to scream at a director doing Shakespeare: For God’s sake, if you don’t like the damn play, don’t stage it. For this Colorado Shakespeare Festival production, Scott Williams has tarted up Measure for Measure with all kinds of extraneous trickery: red umbrellas and vinyl…
Beauty and the Beast. Though it’s backed by expert musicians and technicians, the real miracle is the Phamaly company itself. The leads are as good as — and often better than — anyone you’ll see anywhere. Jenna Bainbridge is the sweetest Belle imaginable, with a clear, strong soprano and, paradoxically,…
It’s getting hard to watch Top Chef D.C. and harder to write about it. I keep waiting to feel the kind of excitement I felt about the show in the past. It may be that this is an uninteresting group of contestants, but I think it’s more the smug idiocy…
When Tyee Tilghman first stepped onto the stage at Curious six years ago — having been lured from Washington, D.C., by artistic director Chip Walton — it was clear Denver had attracted an actor of rare grace and intelligence. He returned the next year, intending to stay six months, and…
If “Try to Remember” doesn’t move you, The Fantasticks plain isn’t working, and though the song carries all kinds of memories for me, I couldn’t summon up so much as a wistful thought hearing it sung in the Colorado Shakespeare Festival production. As written, the show is sweet, pretty, clever…
I love Phamaly, but I’m frequently unenthusiastic about the troupe’s choice of material. I skipped January’s Barefoot in the Park, having long ago been exposed to all the Neil Simon any human being should have to endure in a lifetime. When I heard that the current offering is the Disney…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
Last night, Kenny Gilbert finally won the big one — the Elimination Challenge — and the look of relief on his face was palpable. He’s been an obvious contender from the beginning on this season of Top Chef, but various glitches kept him from what he obviously feels is his…
The premise of Steve Martin’s entirely ahistorical Picasso at the Lapin Agile is that Picasso and Einstein met at an artists’ hangout in Montmartre in 1904. The play that results is a meditation on the nature of creativity and the role of science and art in the twentieth century —…
I’m not sure why director Lynne Collins chose to set her King Lear in the late nineteenth-century American West, since it doesn’t add much of anything to the theme or story. But it does very much fit the persona and acting style of John Hutton, who makes a fine, easy-talking,…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
Last night’s Top Chef DC, episode 4, felt like self-parody — too many chefs; too many flying shots of hands chopping, sauteeing, stirring; too many judgments and too many judges using truncated phrases that communicated only the most basic facts about what they were tasting — well-seasoned, delicious, bland, undercooked;…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
I hate it when Tom Colicchio gets sententious, as he did facing the losing four contestants on last night’s third episode of Top Chef D.C.. Stephen, Tim, Kevin and Tracey stood in front of him, shaken and close to tears, waiting to see who’d get sent home. “Your challenge was…
At the start, Hedwig and the Angry Inch seems like a hipper, wilder, more raucous and contemporary variation on a theme that’s been around since Lanford Wilson’s The Madness of Lady Bright in the ’60s: the loneliness and ultimate psychic disintegration of a gay diva. But the show soon sets…
The early episodes of any Top Chef season tend to feature nonsensical challenges, probably because a large number of chefs are still in play. (I constantly have to remind myself who in the current sixteen is whom. Is that Ed over there? Alex?) Someone has to get sent home each…
Garage Sale Loud: This Is It. Almost every summer, the folks at Heritage Square stage what is essentially a musical review with a thin sustaining plot line and the word “loud” in the title. The conceit is that T.J. Mullin and Annie Dwyer are siblings, and they’re reliving their youth:…
The first episode of Top Chef D.C. aired last night, and like every other food obsessive I know, I was glued to the set. Now in its seventh season, at this point the show is pretty much pure formula — Quickfire Challenge, chefs’ race through Whole Foods, Elimination Challenge, critics’…
For the past two decades — ever since T.J. Mullin took over the space where William Oakley had been mounting melodramas — Heritage Square has produced some of this town’s most consistent entertainment. Over the years, Mullin and his actors have developed a style and approach all their own, producing…
Dietrich & Chevalier. The Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier we all remember were artificial figures, carefully lit, costumed and photographed, their media images manipulated and protected. They were stunning in their glamour and originality, but meant entirely for the screen. For his play, Dietrich and Chevalier, Jerry Mayer has unearthed…
The Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier we remember were artificial figures, carefully lit, costumed and photographed, their media images manipulated and protected. They were stunning in their glamour and originality, but meant entirely for the screen. For his play Dietrich and Chevalier, Jerry Mayer unearthed some unexpected biographical data on…
Girls Only. The trouble with Girls Only, a two-woman evening of skits, singing, improvisation and audience participation, is that it’s so relentlessly nice. Barbara Gehring and Linda Klein have worked together for many years; at some point, they read their early diaries to each other and were transfixed by the…
