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Filtering by Tag: Arena Stage

Dry Goods: Hamlet and Sovereignty, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

I wish I could muster more enthusiasm for Michael Kahn's final Hamlet, starring Michael Urie, or for Sovereignty, an Arena Stage World Premiere entry in the Women's Voices Theater Festival written by Mary Kathryn Nagle, who knows whereof she speaks but not how to make it sing. Those reviews are in this week's Washington City Paper.

Court Disorder: Roe, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Sara Bruner and Jim Abele as Norma McCorvey and Flip Benham in Roe.

Sara Bruner and Jim Abele as Norma McCorvey and Flip Benham in Roe.

My review of Lisa Loomer's Roe — an "openly didactic wiki-play" that was never meant to be as timely as it is — is in this week's Washington City Paper.

This would've been a good one to discuss with the student critics I had the privilege of working with at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival last week. Usually I'm loath to summarize the plot of a play, or to foreground my own political leanings in a review. But when the plot is a history, and our politics desperate, that puts one in a bind.

Losin' It: All the Way and The Mystery of Love and Sex, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Most of the cast of Arena Stage's All the Way, starring Jack Willis as LBJ. (Stan Barouh)

Most of the cast of Arena Stage's All the Way, starring Jack Willis as LBJ. (Stan Barouh)

Prince is all I've thought about in the can-it-really-be-only-a-day since the world learned of his death, but here are the two theatre reviews I filed earlier in the week for the Washington City Paper. Arena Stage does Richard Schenkkan's 2014 Tony winner All the Way, and Signature Theatre stages Bathsheba Doran's The Mystery of Love and Sex.

Okay, back to deliberating whether I should post Prince's long out-of-print 2002 three-disc live album One Night Alone Live, which is not available for purchase anywhere unless you're prepared to drop north of $300 on a used copy. 

A Silver Spoonful of Sugar: The Lion, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Benjamin Scheuer, composer & performer of the solo musical The Lion (Matthew Murphy).

Benjamin Scheuer, composer & performer of the solo musical The Lion (Matthew Murphy).

I struggled with my Washington City Paper review of The Lion, a strong, brief one-man musical play by the singer-songwriter Benjamin Scheuer. This was a case where learning about the circumstances of the show's creation—as one is wont to do when writing about art—made me like it less in hindsight than I did the moment the performance ended. Is that fair? I'm still not sure. You can read my attempt to work through my consternation while still giving the artist his due here.

No More: Oliver!, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

Jake Heston Miller is Oliver! (Margot Schulman)

Jake Heston Miller is Oliver! (Margot Schulman)

It's already been three weeks since I saw Arena Stage's new production of Oliver! Lionel Bart's beloved 1960 musical adaptation of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist — but for various page-cutting reasons, my review did not run in the Washington City Paper until this week's issue. Somehow I got through it without mentioning that Jeff McCarthy, who plays Fagan, was in RoboCop 2.

The Play's the Thing, the Thing, and the Other Thing: The Blood Quilt, Jumpers for Goalposts, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

My reviews of — in alphabetical order — the new play The Blood Quilt, the debuting-in-the-U.S. play Jumpers for Goalposts, and the postmodern chestnut Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, are all in this week's Washington City Paper. Except for the latter two of the three, which are online-only. Find them via the links above.

On Around Town, talking Laugh, Man of La Mancha, The Originalist, and Soon.

Chris Klimek

My regimen of smiling and sentence-speaking practice continues as I join host Robert Aubry Davis and Washington Post arts writer Jane Horwitz for another Around Town panel discussion of what's happening on stage here in Our Nation's Capitol and its close suburbs. In this batch of videos, which have also been airing irregularly on your public television, we discuss three shows I reviewed for the Washington City Paper and one I didn't: Beth Henley's homage to silent film comedies Laugh, the Shakespeare Theatre's new production of the classic musical Man of La Mancha, Arena Stage's world premiere play about divisive Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, The Originalist, and Soon, a new musical about the end of the world, kind of, at Signature Theatre.

These links no longer play nice with my blogging platform, so they're not embeddable.

Laugh

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462454/

Soon

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462413/

Man of La Mancha

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462437/

The Originalist

http://watch.weta.org/video/2365462393/

Deliberations of the Cross: Passion Play and The Originalist, reviewed.

Chris Klimek

It's a strong week for theatre here in our Nation's Capitol. My reviews of The Originalist, Arena Stage playwright-in-residence John Strand's much-awaited play about Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and United States v. Windsor, and Forum Theatre's magnificent production of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play, are in today's Washington City Paper. Go read 'em. Please.

did mention in my draft how similar The Originalist is to Red – the John Logan-penned Arena Stage show from 2012 wherein Originalist star Ed Gero played a different colossal American, the painter Mark Rothko, yelling at a young assistant haunted by a parental tragedy. But I only get one page in the paper, so something had to go.

FURTHER READING: My 2010 review of the prior play I saw about a Supreme Court Justice, wherein Laurence Fishburne played Thurgood Marshall, whose tenure on the court overlapped with Scalia's from Sept. 1986 to Oct. 1991. And United States v. Windsor, in its game-changing entirety.