Author Archive
Tryst $365 Giveaway from Scoutmob
Adams Morgan sure has it good with Tryst. I’m always in envy of my friends who live in close proximity to this classic coffeehouse – as they lounge around, using it as their office so often they get sandwiches named after them. It’s hard to believe Tryst’s been in operation since 1998, one of the [...]
More »Fringe 2011: hookups
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
hookups is about as naked as it can get at Fringe. A quintet of engaging actors make use of an air mattress and the barest essentials to create a series [...]
Fringe Beats the Heat
‘morning water’
courtesy of ‘philliefan99′
Starting at 10am today, Fringe tickets will be cut from the usual $17 to $12 the whole weekend long, as a sweet special to help beat the excruciating heatwave our sins have brought down upon us. Promo code is BEATTHEHEAT, of course. It’s closing weekend and there are a lot of great [...]
Happy Birthday, Hemingway!
Ok, he never lived in DC, but Papa Hemingway is still a favorite of mine, so we’re wishing him a happy birthday! Not for his writing really (though I did have to mimic his style several times at nerd camp, but that’s another story), but for his passionate love of the cocktail.
Today at Cuba Libre [...]
We Love Arts: POP!
What to expect from a musical about Andy Warhol, the late 20th century pop art genius who smashed convention and provided a nest for self-proclaimed misfits to help him create wild non-conformist art? His shooting by self-proclaimed revolutionary feminist Valerie Solanas seems like it would make excellent fodder – after all, when Warhol Superstar Viva [...]
More »Fringe 2011: A Piece of Pi
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
There is no pie in A Piece of Pi.
I feel it’s necessary to point this out, because after all, there are clowns. So one might expect some pie-throwing with a [...]
Fringe 2011: Cecily and Gwendolyn’s Fantastical Capital Balloon Ride
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
True experimental theater breaks down the divide of expectations between performer and audience. Extroverts usually love this. Introverts, not so much. No surprise then that the long-form improvisation Cecily and [...]
Fringe 2011: Crave
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
Every heartbreaker eventually gets their heart broken. Cosmic justice, karma, the wheel of fortune – whatever you call it, the seesaw of relationships will always go from up to down [...]
Fringe 2011: Sanyasi
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
Can you ever truly detach from the world? From emotions, like heartache, greed, love? From the mundane, the pettiness of every day existence? Is this truly liberation, or is renunciation [...]
Fringe 2011: The Malachite Palace
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
Though there’s definitely an element of raunchy radicalism about Fringe, it’s important to remember that there are performances suitable for all. If you have a small child in your life, [...]
Fringe 2011: Tactile Dinner Car
I’m reviewing seven plays over the course of the 2011 Capital Fringe Festival, in collaboration with DC Theatre Scene. Get your Fringe button and join me!
For a crash course on what to expect from Fringe, you can’t do better than banished? productions mad avant-garde experience, Tactile Dinner Car. It’s a crazy sociological experiment playing by [...]
Congratulations, Duffy’s!
‘Duffy’s’
courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’
Back in late April when I profiled publican Andy Duffy on the challenges of running your own tavern, we talked about the hope that the hours restrictions would be lifted on Duffy’s in a then-upcoming ABC Board vote. The restrictions have been a real hardship over the past five years since Duffy’s [...]
2011 Capital Fringe Festival
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courtesy of ‘erin m’
Last night I got tied up to two people. We were force fed food through a syringe. Several people ate bugs. A couple needed the Heimlich. It blew all our minds.
Welcome to Fringe!
Judging by the happy crowd buzzing through the heat at the Baldacchino Gypsy Tent last night, the 2011 Capital Fringe [...]
Lost Society Opening on U Street
‘Steak, Lost Society’
courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’
Last Thursday I was a guest at the media preview for “boutique steakhouse” Lost Society, occupying the top two floors of a classic corner building at 14th and U Streets. I’ve long awaited this building’s renovation, as it’s been a blight on a corner of what should be prime real [...]
We Love Arts: The Merchant of Venice
We come to a performance of The Merchant of Venice with a lot of preconceptions. One of them has to do with the title itself. It doesn’t refer to its most famous character, I remember a brilliant English professor beating into my brain. “Shylock isn’t the merchant,” he said repeatedly, “Antonio is.”
Antonio? Wait, who? That [...]
Theater Spotlight: White Hot Set
If you’ve seen Shakespeare Theatre Company’s excellent production of Old Times, chances are your first impression was of a monochromatic letterbox, as the minimalist all-white set seemed to float against the black proscenium (and if you haven’t seen Old Times, you need to get hopping over to the Lansburgh this week, as closing is July [...]
More »We Love Arts: Don Quixote
There is nothing on stage in Synetic Theater’s Don Quixote more expressive than Dan Istrate’s eyes. Which is odd, because they are actually anything but – wide, unseeing, unblinking eyes focused anywhere else except on reality. Matched by his frozen arms in an almost wooden stance, his mad foolhardy knight is like a marionette or [...]
More »We Love Arts: Venus in Fur
The night I saw Venus in Fur, I had strange dreams. Given that the play is inspired by the infamous 1870’s novel that gave birth to the term sado-masochism, I’ll forgive you if your first thought was that my dreams were a dizzying melange of whips, dog collars and PVC boots. After all, Studio Theatre’s [...]
More »We Love Arts: Swampoodle
“Warning: Swampoodle may contain eye-popping feats, roller derby smackdowns, big-track machinery, brass band music and scenes of a spectacular nature.”
It’s been two days since I’ve seen Swampoodle, the joint production by Irish company The Performance Corporation and DC’s own Solas Nua, a site-specific piece at the historic Uline Arena. I think the warning above that [...]
Art Explodes at 14th & Florida
‘BYT/Vitaminwater Uncapped 9′
courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’
I’m standing in front of a beat-up industrial building whose windows are papered with notices, its imposing iron gate clanged shut. It doesn’t look like much is happening on this corner of 14th and Florida Avenue NW. But above me is a new black sign with familiar logos signaling that [...]
