Articles by Davina Grace Hill

Colonial Players’ In The Next Room or The Vibrator...

Interesting. Very interesting.

In stereotype, the Victorian era is dark and overbearing, peopled with prudish and stodgy citizens. That stereotype gives the required context for Sarah Ruhl’s In The Next Room or The Vibrator Play. The assumption is that the doctor — providing relief for hysteria by using a vibrator on his patients, female and male — is both innovative for Victorian sensibilities and naïve of mental and physical health concerns as we understand them today. Directed by...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 5/9/13

Bay Theatre Company’s The Price

A brilliant staging of Arthur Miller’s moving tribute to bonds that bind

Sometimes you want a simple beach novel to bide away the time, and sometimes you want to be in the presence of a master who can control language, inflection and develop great profound meanings. If you are in the latter mood, Bay Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s The Price is the show to see. In The Price, Miller revisits the family dynamics he explored in Death of a Salesman. This work has some prescient lines for today, some of the most realistic (and often, painful) family dialogues...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 5/2/13

The Theatre at AACC’s The Underpants

Three surprising sources combine to make comedy

Theater starts with the written word, comes to life in the voices of actors and endures in the memory of its audiences. Sometimes, as with Carl Sternheim’s The Underpants, written in 1910, it gets forgotten until someone rediscovers it, reimagines it and breathes life into it — as comedian Steve Martin did for The Underpants in 2002. A German farce, The Underpants seems a comedic take on Ibsen’s The Doll House, which debuted 31 years earlier. The themes of...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 4/18/13

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 Davina Grace Hill; 3/28/13

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; 2/28/13

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 Davina Grace Hill; 2/21/13

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...

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

Scrooge Makes Colonial Players’ Christmas Carol...

By November 25, almost two weeks before opening night, Colonial Players’ musical A Christmas Carol was sold out. That amazing feat speaks to the power of Charles Dickens’ classic and to Colonial Players’ place in the traditions of its community. Colonial’s homegrown Carol — with play and lyrics by Richard Wade and composed by Richard Gessner — debuted in 1981. This is its 29th incarnation. At a scant 75 minutes, with 11...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 12/13/12

2nd Star Productions’ Oklahoma!

Great songs, strong voices and spirited dancing

Oklahoma!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning first collaboration between Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II, is a rousing night of theater with spirited and memorable music. 2nd Star Productions has the vocal talent to do justice to this great musical. Director and set designer Jane B. Wingard has chosen to present an Oklahoma! with a beautifully painted set that is flat and one-dimensional. That works because it keeps the focus on the music and the voices. ...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 11/15/12

To Kill a Mockingbird

Compass Rose Studio Theatre sets a new standard for a classic

Now playing at Compass Rose Studio Theatre is a powerful, moving production of an American classic. The Pulitzer Prize went to Harper Lee in her first and only novel, and Oscars for the 1962 film went to Gregory Peck and to Horton Foote for his screenplay adaptation. It takes guts to present To Kill a Mockingbird because Gregory Peck is seared into the role of Atticus Finch. When the American Film Institute ranked movie heroes of the 20th century, Atticus Finch ranked...

Article - Theatre Reviews; by Davina Grace Hill; 10/18/12