Author Archive
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 [...]
More »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 [...]
More »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 [...]
More »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 [...]
More »2011 Capital Fringe Festival
” 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, [...]
More »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 [...]
More »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? [...]
More »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 [...]
More »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 [...]
More »We Love Arts: The Green Bird
With Carlo Gozzi’s The Green Bird, Constellation Theatre has found the perfect medium for their hyper-surrealist style in a play inspired by commedia dell’arte. It’s like a wild Ferrari driven by Max Ernst through a Brothers Grimm forest. Every piece – acting, design, script – is completely committed to the creation of a madcap fairy [...]
More »We Love Arts: Cyrano
If you’re expecting to see Folger Theatre do the traditional over-three-hours-five-acts-cast-of-hundreds production of Cyrano (and yes, having been brought up on Derek Jacobi’s brilliant RSC Cyrano, I was), forget it. You don’t need the caffeine, it’s already built into this lightning fast adaptation by Michael Hollinger and director Aaron Posner. Nine actors play multiple roles over [...]
More »We Love Arts: Ruined
There are 683 seats in the Fichandler theater at Arena Stage. The house was packed for Ruined, playwright Lynn Nottage’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning play about the atrocities inflicted on women during the Second Congo War (1998-2003). They laughed, they cried, they applauded. They applauded a lot. And then they left. I heard many say [...]
More »We Love Drinks: Andy Duffy
‘Duffy’s’ courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’ We Love Drinks continues our series where we look behind the bar, profiling the many people – from mixologists to bartenders, sommeliers to publicans – who make your drinks experience happen. Up to this point in our profile series, we’ve mainly focused on the craft of bartending, a profession that’s [...]
More »Drinks Special: Spring Cocktails at Saint-Ex
‘Whipping up A Sour Thyme cocktail’ courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’ With any luck, every once and a while I attend a drinks tasting where cocktails and setting perfectly align to create a rather magical experience. Ok, maybe the magic is all due to the haze of booze, but there are worse ways to spend an [...]
More »Spring Cocktails at AGAINN
‘Spring cocktail trio, AGAINN’ courtesy of ‘Jenn Larsen’ Fresh off his excellent showing at ARTINI, Brent Davis invited me to sample a few of the new spring cocktails over at British gastropub AGAINN. As I sat sipping drinks observing the happy hour crew, Brent greeted regulars with a friendly wave and a jibe. It was [...]
More »We Love Arts: The New Electric Ballroom
Countless poets have asked the question – is love worth the risk of a broken heart? Are fleeting moments of a racing pulse and desire’s first flush worth facing the possibility of loss and loneliness? To those questions, Irish playwright Enda Walsh adds – is it better to just stay safe inside? In The Walworth [...]
More »We Love Arts: The Walworth Farce
In a dingy public housing apartment three men act out a daily routine, a twisted attempt at farce that’s rife with repeated humiliation and competition. It’s a “routine to keep the family safe,” the patriarch justifies, and it takes a bit for the audience to catch on that what they are seeing is the desperate [...]
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