Posts Tagged ‘20024’

We Love Arts: The Book Club Play

Despite being an avid reader, I’ve somehow missed out on the whole book club phenomenon. Maybe it’s that whole Groucho Marx "I refuse to join a club that would have me as a member" thing. So when it came time to see Karen Zacarias’ The Book Club Play at Arena Stage, who better to bring [...]

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 [...]

We Love Arts: The Chosen

There’s something old-fashioned about Theater J’s production of The Chosen, presented with a quiet sensitivity in the staging and the acting, echoed in the warm wood of James Kronzer’s set. To call it old-fashioned is to by no means denigrate its power. It has a sepia-toned subtlety.
Theater J first produced an adaptation of Chaim Potok’s [...]

We Love Arts: At Home at the Zoo

Forty-five years separate the two acts of At Home at the Zoo, though in terms of the play’s action it’s probably only an hour. The second act is The Zoo Story. Written in 1958, it’s the play that assured Edward Albee’s genius. The first act is Homelife, written in 2004 as an exploration of what happened [...]

Kastles relocate to Waterfront for 2011-12 Seasons

We Love Arts: The Arabian Nights

There are two types of perfume. One kind hits with a ravishing force. You recognize the top notes instantly, as they drag you down an olfactory lane whether you want to or not. The other kind is subtly layered, ingratiating itself into your memory with a more delicate air. I expected Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of [...]

We Love Arts: Oklahoma!

The company of the Arena Stage at the Mead Center for American Theater production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!Photo by Carol Rosegg.
Arena Stage’s Oklahoma! – their first production since their return to their proper home – isn’t perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. The dramatic misses are made-up for in [...]

Thrifty District: Paint Your Own Nails

‘Tube nails’
courtesy of ‘Phil Hawksworth’
Getting your nails done doesn’t seem like that big of an expense– what’s $20 here or there? But pampering like that is easy to cut out of your budget while still keeping your fingernails pretty and maintained at home.
Thrifty: First, you need some good supplies. At the minimum, you need nail [...]

We Love Drinks: Cantina Marina

Sometimes you don’t care about lovingly crafted cocktails or the beautiful people or even 12% ABV beer. Sometimes you just want a drink in a plastic cup. With a view.
Cantina Marina is the kind of place you could easily find in Florida, a simple almost shack-like atmosphere on the Gangplank Marina, with three sides open to the [...]

Where We Live: Southwest Waterfront

‘The Forgotten City’
courtesy of ‘M.V. Jantzen’
Hello and welcome to another edition of Where We Live.  This week we’ll be checking out the smallest quadrant in the District, Southwest.  Can you imagine city planners essentially wiping out an entire neighborhood and starting from scratch?  Well, that’s what planners did to this area back in the 1950s.  [...]

Monumental: Titanic Memorial

Bitter sweet&soggy

‘Hold onto your hats!’
courtesy of ‘lorigoldberg’
We’re getting much-needed rain today. The U.S. Drought Monitor shows our region as being in moderate drought conditions, so this rainfall is good news. It’s not a one-shot fix, though – Capitol Weather pointed out at the end of last month that we were a full five inches below normal, [...]

Monumental: John Ericsson Navigation Memorial

John Ericsson, a Swedish inventor, has a beautiful monument just south of the Lincoln Memorial on the median near the intersection of Ohio Drive SW and Independence Avenue SW. The beautiful pink granite statue was placed on its current location in 1927, at a cost of $60,000. $35,000 of that was federal funds, [...]

Monumental: James Abram Garfield

You know how you have a favorite president growing up? Like, you get assigned the guy, knowing he’s not one of the big five, but he turns out to be interesting in his own right? Meet mine, James Abram Garfield. I think it was in Mrs. Franti’s third-grade class that we all [...]