Arts and Culture (Theatre Reviews)

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 4/11/13

Compass Rose Theater’s Eleemosynary

Playing thru Mother’s Day, this study in maternal dysfunction should be required viewing for everyone but childless orphans

Can an estranged grandmother, mother and daughter find grace in time to rebuild their family? This is the question Compass Rose Theater poses in their promotion for Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary, an award-winning play that takes its name from an obscure word in a spelling bee dictionary. Appearing now through Mother’s Day, this study in maternal dysfunction should be required viewing for everyone but childless orphans. For if nurture trumps nature and we are what our parents made us,...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Michelle Steel - 4/4/13

Twin Beach Players’ Rumors

You’ll laugh until you ache, then laugh some more

Four affluent couples gathered in a posh suburban residence for a dinner party to honor friends’ 10th anniversary celebration find mischief surrounding the event. There are no servants: How can the party continue? The hostess is missing. So is the host — the deputy mayor of New York City — who has reportedly shot himself through the earlobe. Couples arrive in succession. The first to arrive discover Charlie Brock’s injury and put...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 3/28/13

Colonial Players’ 1776

See a Congress of courage and passion, theater of vision and great musical entertainment

In 1969, Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards created 1776, a compelling historical musical. (Have those three descriptive words ever before been used together?) Their play depicts the debates, passions and courage it took to craft the Declaration of Independence and start along the path to creating this new country, the United States of America. 1776 won the 1969 Best Musical Tony Award. It is an almost perfect amalgam of strong music, humorous one-liners and passionate...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 3/21/13

Bowie Community Theatre’s In the Heat of the Night

This Night is so dark that you strain to see the actors

Bowie Community Theatre is up to its rafters in shady business again. The troupe that brought you Murder By Misadventure and Who Dunit? now turns to the segregated South for a crime drama with the twisted face of bigotry. Matt Pelfrey’s 2010 stage adaptation of In the Heat of the Night is based on the John Ball novel that inspired an Oscar-winning film and an Emmy-winning TV series. The place: Argo, Alabama. The time: 1962. The crime: murder. The victim: developer...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 2/28/13

2nd Star Productions’ It Runs in the Family

Laugh your way out of winter with this play

The British have been stereotyped as stodgy. The truth is that they are quite bawdy and irreverent. The plays of Ray Cooney — including It Runs in the Family, now playing at 2nd Star Productions — are typical British humor. The British love a farce where nothing is sacred or above ridicule. In It Runs in the Family that includes the clergy, police, doctors and matrimony. “If you tell a lie, make it a whopper,” an actors says in words that could be...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 2/21/13

True-Life Drama with Scope, Depth and Satisfaction

Colonial Players’ two-person show Trying will surprise you in a good way

Trying will surprise you in a good way. Colonial Players is promoting this delightful two-person show as a work rich in history and contrasts, and it is. It is also a love story, refreshingly sweet and platonic. Judge Francis Biddle, a national and international statesman, needed a personal assistant as he gathered his memoirs and responded to requests for information on the Nuremberg Trial, which he presided over, and the Japanese Internment of World War II, which he had...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 2/14/13

Laughing at Our Nightmares – Two comedies at Bay...

In Sister Mary Ignatius and in The Actor’s Nightmare are plights you’ll remember from your past and in your dreams

Winter has a way of boxing us into our insular realities. Bay Theatre unfolds them with mind-bending comedy in a double bill of one-acts: the Obie Award-winning satire Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You! and The Actor’s Nightmare. Both are by Christopher Durang, sometimes referred to as Christopher Deranged. The stage is set with an ancient stone edifice featuring skewed doorways behind a marble balustrade or altar. A church courtyard, perhaps, where we will...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 2/7/13

Opera AACC’s Jesus Christ Superstar

Passionate singing electrifies scripture with personal resonance

When two 20-somethings recorded a musical version of the Passion of Jesus Christ in 1971, rock opera was an innovation. Then Norman Jewison turned Andrew Lloyd Webber’s score and Tim Rice’s lyrics into the iconic 1973 film Jesus Christ Superstar, slapping audiences awake with an electrified take on the scriptures. Forty years later, the experiment is an international phenomenon, staged in concert by Opera AACC with riveting effect. Remarkable singing and acting...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Jane C. Elkin - 1/31/13

Compass Rose’s Barefoot in the Park

Opposites not only attract, they also repel, making for a timeless comedy

Neil Simon’s 1963 romantic comedy Barefoot in the Park was a box office smash on stage and screen, not merely because it starred dreamy Robert Redford but because it’s packed with hilarious moments. What’s not to get about newlyweds learning the hard lessons of why opposites not only attract but also repel? The story, as old as matrimony, roused braying guffaws of recognition from Compass Rose Studio Theater’s mature audience on opening night. Free-...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill - 1/24/13

Daddy’s Dyin’ … Who’s Got the Will?

Here’s Crimes of the Heart flipped to comedy

“Why is it that whenever she is wrong, we’re the ones who feel bad?,” asks one sister about another in Bowie Community Theatre’s new production of playwright Del Shores’ comedy Daddy’s Dyin’ … Who’s Got the Will? Such are the family tensions at the heart of the show and, honestly, haven’t we all been there — probably very recently at a holiday gathering? The Turnover family has gathered at their dying...