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News Archive - January,
2008 |
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1-31 |
Maurice Hines Performs At The Smithsonian's Jazz Cafe
Tomorrow
The Atrium Cafe at the Smithsonian's Natural History
Museum will be the venue for a Jazz Cafe performance by
Maurice Hines tomorrow, February 1. The singer, dancer
and actor will perform as the kick off of the
Smithsonian's programming for Black History Month. His
most recent notable appearance in the Potomac Region was
the musical
Hot
Feet featuring the music of Earth, Wind and Fire
which he
conceived, choreographed and directed. It had its
pre-Broadway tryout here at the National Theatre before
its short run in New York. The Jazz Cafe's are held
every Friday from 6:30 to 10 pm with live jazz and a
cash bar with a $12 cover charge. |
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1-30 |
Four of Ten Nominees For
Blackburn
International Playwriting Prize Have Been Produced Here
The panel of judges for the 30th annual Susan Smith
Blackburn Prize, which recognizes women playwrights from
around the world who have written works of outstanding
quality for the English-Speaking theater, have selected
ten nominees, and four of them have been previously
produced in the
Potomac Region. The honor carries a $20,000 award. Past
recipients include Caryl Churchill, Gina Gionfriddo,
Charlotte Jones, Dael Orlandersmith, Sarah Ruhl, Paula
Vogel and Wendy Wasserstein.
The four nominees for this year who have been produced
here are British playwright Bryony Lavery whose
play
Frozen was produced at Studio Secondstage,
Lydia Diamond whose
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
was
produced at Theater Alliance, Julie Marie Myatt, author
of
The
Sex Habits of American Women which was produced
by Signature Theatre and Judith Thompson whose
Perfect Pie was one of the offerings of the
Potomac Theatre Festival at Olney Theatre Center in
2004. The other nominees are Linda Brogan and Polly
Stenham of England, Lisa McGee of Northern Ireland,
Linda McGee of Scotland and Jenny Schwartz and Victoria
Steward, both of the US. |
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1-29 |
More On Kennedy Center Japanese Performing Arts Festival
The schedule for the
Kennedy
Center's Millennium Stage during the Japanese Performing
Arts Festival "Japan Culture + Hyper Culture" finds free
performances relating to Japanese arts each night from
February 5 to 17. Shows are at 6 o'clock each
evening and no admission tickets are required. Here's
the schedule:
Tuesday, 2/5 - Shin Tanaka: the art of paper toy
making.
Wednesday, 2/6 - Pianist Aki Takahashi: new music.
Thursday, 2/ 7 - Junko Koshino: Garments inspired by
the Kimono.
Friday, 2/8 - OKI Dub Ainu Band and Marewrew: fusing
reggae, African, and electronic music with Ainu folk
melodies.
Saturday, 2/9 - Hakata Kinjishi Taiko and Hakata Koma:
Drumming derived from the Lion Dance (plus the
400-year-old art of top spinning.)
Sunday, 2/10 - YMCK: Music reminiscent of old video
games.
Monday, 2/11 - Ebina Performing Arts: Freestyle
hip-hop dance.
Tuesday, 2/12 - Koji Kakinuma's Trancework: giant
calligraphy work.
Wednesday, 2/13 - Takagi Masakatsu: multimedia
performance.
Thursday, 2/14 - Yasuki Fukushima with Masato Nagahata:
“shouted” tanka poetry.
Friday, 2/15 - Flowers - A world premiere by
the all-female Strange Kinoko Dance Company.
Saturday, 2/16 - Maywa Denki - performance with
robotic instruments.
Sunday, 2/17 - A Harajuku Evening - music and dance
devoted to the Tokyo neighborhood renowned for its
style and fashion. |
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1-28 |
Three Plays by Young Playwrights Free Tonight At Woolly
This month's New Writers Now!, which presents
readings of student plays by professional actors, will
have three new plays being read this evening at
Woolly Mammoth Theatre on D
Street NW. One, an untitled play by Wenda Thompson has
"a heartsick man" trying to convince his wife to stay
with him. Love WHAT!? NO!? Me a 10 Year old?! What?
Uh-oh!! by Mayra Rivera deals with the condition of
"Sticky Brain." Jane Stirling's The True Power
of Friendship is set in a fairy tale world where "a
lonely dog runs from a witch and finds a friend." The
Young Playwright's Theatre
event begins at 7 pm and admission is free. |
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1-25 |
Kennedy Center To Host Japanese Performing Arts Groups
In February
As part of a festival to be known as "Japan! Culture +
Hyper Culture" the Kennedy Center will be hosting rarely
seen Japanese performing arts companies and productions
in February. The Opera House will have Yukio Ninawawa's
Shintoku-Maru, a "fable of love, lust and
revenge" featuring music by Akira Miyagawa and staring
Tatsuya Fujiwara who starred in the original production
of the show in London ten years ago. It will be
performed in Japanese without English surtitles but with
a detailed synopsis provided and a recorded description
of the plot read by Alan Rickman
prior to the performance. Also in the Opera House, the
butoh company Sankai Juku
will perform a story of a boy's dream of the origins of
life and death, Kinkan
Shonen.
In the
Family Theater, the center offers the world premiere of
a musical for young adults by
Pacific Overtures' director Amon Miyamoto,
Up in the Air: The Story of
Boonah, the Tree-Climbing Frog. It features a
score by Bill Russell and Henry Krieger, who wrote the
score for Side Show. In the Terrace
Theater, The Mansaku-no-Kai Kyogen Company will perform
both
Traditional Kyogen Works and a version of a
Shakespearean comedy,
The Kyogen of Errors.
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1-24 |
Signature Signs Big Name
Broadway Cast Members For Kander & Ebb Festival
Big names from Broadway are lining up in the cast
lists for Signature Theatre's
Kander & Ebb festival. When the east coast premiere of
The Visit was announced, it was big news that it
would star Chita Rivera. She is, after all, a two-time
Tony Award winner who was the original Anita in West
Side Story. Since then, George Hearn, himself a
two-time Tony Award winner (Sunset Boulevard and
La Cage aux Folles) has been added as her
co-star. For the revival of Kiss of the Spider Woman,
the most recent Anita - Natascia Diaz who had that role
in the recent revival of West Side Story which
played Wolf Trap last summer - will be joined by Hunter
Foster who was the original Bobby Strong on Broadway in
Urinetown. Now Variety is reporting that the cast
will also include Will Chase whose Broadway credits
include staring roles in Miss Saigon, Rent, Aida, The
Full Monty, Lennon and High Fidelity. Stay
tuned for casting announcements about the third full
production of a Kander and Ebb musical, The Happy
Time.
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1-23 |
Sandy Spring Theatre Group's Not
So Soft Wins MD Community One Act Festival Award
Jonah
Knight's
unpublished play Not So Soft, as produced by the
Sandy Spring Theatre Group, walked away with the
Outstanding Production award at this weekend's Maryland
Community Theatre Festival. Two members of the cast,
Ashley Byrd and Brett Estey also earned Outstanding
Performance awards. Another Outstanding Performance
Award went to Kryss Lacovaro for the Rockville Little
Theatre's Get Stuffed which earned the
First Runner Up slot for Outstanding Production. Both
productions will advance to the Eastern States Theatre
Festival to be held in May in Delaware. The other
Outstanding Performance Award went to Annette Kalicki
for her performance in Cedar Lane Stage's Paul
Campbell Hits The Big Time which earned the 2nd
Runner Up slot for Outstanding Production. In other
awards, Kryss Lacovaro was named Outstanding Director
for Not So Soft, the Sandy Spring Theatre Group's
One Tomato, Two Tomato was cited for Outstanding
Costume Design and Montgomery Playhouse's The Last
Goodnight received the technical excellence award. |
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1-22 |
Reston's Into the Woods, Kensington's
Nevermore and Reston's Seussical Top WATCH
Nomination Count
The nominations for the Washington Area Theatre
Community Honors - the WATCH awards which recognize
quality work in the region's community theaters - have
been announced and three musicals topped the list of
multi-nominated shows. The Rockville Musical Theatre
production of Into the Woods had the most with
thirteen nominations, followed by the Kensington Arts
Theatre's Nevermore and the Reston Community
Players' Seussical with twelve each. The Little
Theatre of Alexandria garnered the most nominations with
nineteen for work on six different productions. The
winners will be announced and the awards presented at a
gala celebration at the Birchmere in Alexandria on March
2. Click here to see the
entire list of nominees. |
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1-18 |
Arlington's Sister City's
DO-Theatre Performs At The Spectrum Saturday, January 19
Arlington, the home of a notable movement-based
theater, Paata Tsikurishvili's Synetic Theater, is also
a sister city to Aachen, Germany, home of a notable
movement-based theater named DO-Theatre. The German
company will perform its show
Hangman/Game Theory, at the Rosslyn Spectrum
tomorrow night. It is billed as a "sinister,
noir-tinged, 1920s gangster dance theatre piece" by the
company which is "rooted in the extreme physicality of
post-communist Russia's movement-based theater
traditions." |
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1-17 |
Theater J Teams With Embassy Of Switzerland To Host
"Monodrama"
One actress, accompanied by one saxophonist, performs
Sabina Spielrein.
The play premiered in Switzerland and will play at
Theater J next month under the sponsorship of
Switzerland's Embassy and the Jung Society of
Washington. The play details the life of Spielrein who
was part of the movement of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung
and became a leading psychoanalyst in Russia before
being killed, along with her two daughters, by Nazi
soldiers in 1942. As in the premiere last November at
the Theater Stadelhofen in Zurich, Gabriella Rossi plays
all the roles and
American
Harry White plays
saxophone. |
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1-16 |
MD
Community Theatre One-Act Play Festival This Weekend In
LaPlata
The 23rd Annual Maryland One-Act Play Festival takes
place at the Port Tobacco Players' Theater in LaPlata
this weekend. Tickets are $10 a session, or $30 for all
four sessions. Here's the schedule:
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Friday at 7:30 pm -
Never Swim Alone
and Baker's Meadow - Port Tobacco Players,
Significant Others - Silver Spring Stage
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Saturday at 10:00 am - Not One Single Thing -
Laurel Mill Playhouse, One Tomato, Two Tomato
and Not So Soft - Sandy Spring Theatre Group
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Saturday at 1:30 pm - Get Stuffed - Rockville
Little Theatre, Paul Campbell Hits The Big Time
- Cedar Lane Stage, Estelle vs. The Washington
Redskins - Laurel Mill Playhouse, Lizard Brains
- Silver Spring Stage, Funeral Tea - Newtowne
Players
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Saturday at 7:30 pm - Hunger - Thurmont
Thespians, The Last Goodnight - Montgomery
Playhouse, The Author's Voice - Hard Bargain
Players
In
addition, there will be a brunch at 11 am and the awards
ceremony at 1:00 pm on Sunday. |
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1-15 |
Charter Announces Two New Musicals For Kids
The Arlington-based company specializing in new plays,
Charter Theatre, has announced
two new musical comedies for children ages 5 to 10 to
play Saturday mornings at the Theatre on the Run during
the runs of their evening shows. The Wakeness Monster
will play during the run of their current adult show,
F.U., and Chicken in the Family will play
during the run of Clinton Johnson's Am I Black Enough
Yet? starting in May. Both shows will begin at 11 am
and tickets will be $10. |
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1-14 |
Theater Scholarships For High School Seniors Available
Again this year, NVTA - an organization of community
theaters in the Potomac Region - will offer $1,000
scholarships to high school seniors interested in
pursuing their studies in performance or theater design.
One scholarship will go to a student interested in
pursuing studies in drama or musical theater while
another will support a student's study of set, costume,
makeup or lighting design. NVTA, which used to simply be
the Northern Virginia Theatre Alliance, has grown to
include 21 member companies in Virginia, four in
Washington and two in Maryland. Each year they sponsor
the One Act Play Festival. The deadline for application
this year is February 16th. Information on the
scholarship program is available at
www.nvtaweb.org or
from Anne Ridgway at (703) 330-2787. |
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1-11 |
CENTERSTAGE Launches Student Critics Project
Baltimore school students in grades 6 through 12 will
have the opportunity to dig deeply into productions at CENTERSTAGE and critique them. A dozen classes from
local schools will be chosen for the program. Cast and creative team members, as well as
professional critics, will visit the classrooms and the
students will come to CENTERSTAGE to see performances which
they will review. CENTERSTAGE will select some of the
best reviews for publication on its website and award
their writers with tickets to a future performance for
them and their families. The program is co-sponsored by
Comcast Cable. |
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1-10 |
Two New Original Cast Albums Hit
Stores This Week - Potomac Stages Reviews Them Both
In an age when original cast recordings are all too
rare (as are original new musicals to be recorded) this
week was notable for the release of two new scores on
the PS-Classics label, one a completely original score
and one a Broadway mounting of a musical movie with an
augmented score. The Broadway Cast Album of the musical
based on the 1980 flop movie Xanadu was reviewed
here on Tuesday. Today we present the review of the
London premiere production of the totally original score
for Take Flight, a piece exploring the human
aspiration to soar through the combined stories of the
Wright Brothers, Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Eahart.
Click here to read
the review of Xanadu and
here to read the
review of Take Flight. |
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1-9 |
American Century's Jack Marshall
Writes About Guns on Stage
The latest production of Jack Marshall's American
Century Theater is the stark police drama
Cops which is
reviewed on Potomac Stages today. As is his habit,
Marshall has compiled an Audience Guide of original
articles and reprints on topics related to the
production. One of the articles he penned for this
show's guide is a thoughtful survey of the problems and
procedures involved when a play calls for guns on stage.
While the article will, indeed, be of interest to the
audience members of this production, we felt that it
would also interest those theatergoers who may not
manage to catch Cops during its run at Arlington's
Theatre Two in the Gunston Arts Center. Mr. Marshall was
good enough to grant us permission to republish the
article. Click here to read
Guns On Stage: Flirting with Danger in Pursuit of Art
by Jack Marshall. |
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1-8 |
In Sweeney's Wake, Grand Guignol
Gets A Potomac Region Revival
The release of the movie version of Stephen Sondheim's
Sweeney Todd, which was based on a horror play in
the tradition of Paris' Grand Guignol theater, may
stimulate interest in the productions of a new theater
company in the Potomac Region. The Molotov Theatre Group
specializes in the genre, which was named for a small
293-seat theater which opened in 1897 and earned a
reputation for what were referred to as naturalistic
horror shows. The company will mount a trilogy of Grand Guignol one act plays under the title
Blood, Sweat & Fears
at the 1409 Playbill Cafe on 14th Street starting
tomorrow night. The three have been translated into
English by Richard Hand and Michael Wilson. |
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1-7 |
A
Thought to Ponder: Why Doesn't The Kennedy Center's
Millennium Stage Schedule More Theater?
The Kennedy Center has a free performance at 6 o'clock
every night of the year which offers performers from
around the region and around the nation a chance to
display their talents. Only infrequently are the performances theater-related.
Far more often the fare is music
- classical, folk, jazz, rap ... you name it. But theatrical performances are so rare that we have not established
a separate page for the Millennium Stage schedule
although we maintain seven different pages for the
various venues and programs of the Center. Since the
Center began the program in 1997 there have been over
25,000 performances. How many of them were theater
related isn't clear, but the record of late has been sad.
A search of the Center's Millennium Stage data base in the category
"theater" yields only 175 events since 1988, none since September
17. The majority of these seem to have been selections
of songs from musicals, not performances of dialogue
material. Compare that to 860 entries under "Jazz," 790
under "Classical Music," 411 under "Rock/Pop/Soul" and
225 for "Country/Bluegrass." Surely there are theater
companies near and far who could bring a one-act play or
other short work to the Center for one free performance.
Four hundred people stop to watch a typical evening's
performance. Those performances are captured on
video and offered free online as live webcasts which are
then archived for later viewing. It would provide many a
theater company with a chance to reach a new audience. |
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1-4 |
Arena Unveils New, Temporary Venue in Crystal City
Last night's opening of the bio-musical/jazz concert
Ella gave
theater-goers their first look at the space where Arena
Stage will perform a majority of the shows over the next
two and a half years while the Southwest Washington
campus is renovated, expanded and completely revised.
The rest of the 2007-08 season will be performed at the
venue called Arena Stage in Crystal City just over the
14th Street Bridge from Washington, at 1800 S. Bell
Street adjacent to the Crystal City Marriott. The venue
will also be the principal space for the 2008-09 and the
2009-10 seasons, although additional shows may well be
staged in Washington's Lincoln Theatre. The Crystal City
venue is a converted lecture hall/convention facility
similar to the Spectrum in Rosslyn. Its conversion to a legitimate theater
venue has been quite successful from an audience
standpoint. With some 460 seats in 19 rows offering
extraordinary leg room all on one level, the sightlines
are clear and the acoustics, at least for the amplified
jazz-centered show Ella, superb. The venue has
new light and sound systems utilizing some of the
equipment from the now-under-renovation Kreeger Theatre
in Arena's current campus. The stage area is a source
of concern, as it lacks width or depth and offers little
in the way of wing or fly space for designers to work
with. (The space is under a swimming pool, so
there is no way to increase access vertically and the
hotel's laundry is behind the stage's rear wall.)
Ella, being a one-set play, is particularly well
suited to this kind of facility, but there will be
challenges in the years ahead to find ways to present
more complex shows in the space. The four rear rows of
the hall flank a wide and deep sound, light and show
management center which gives the seats in rows R
through U a bit of an isolated feel. The rest of the
house is well laid out with side sections of six or
seven seats each separated from the fifteen-seat center
section by two wide aisles. The lobby is fairly large
and rest room facilities seem up to the task of handling
the intermission rush if the break isn't too short.
Parking is not a problem with plenty of free evening and
weekend parking, and the venue is a short stroll from
the exit from the Crystal City Metro Station. There are
many good restaurants within easy walking distance as
well. (Click here to go to our
Arena Under Construction page for a look at Arena's
future.) |
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1-3 |
The Potomac Stages' Ushers Liked Avenue Q Best Of
All December '07 Shows
In the judgment of the theater enthusiasts who usher
at many theaters in the Potomac Region and who
participate in the Potomac
Stages Ushers' Favorite Show Award program, 2007 was
a good year for touring shows at National Theatre. In
March
Doubt became the first national tour to be
selected for the Ushers' Favorite Show of the Month
award and now
Avenue Q has been selected as the favorite for
December, becoming the first touring musical to win the
honor. Now that shows have been selected for all twelve
months of 2007, the ushers will be asked to select among
the winners their favorite show of the year. That
selection will be announced here later this month.
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Click here for the news archive for
December, 2007 |
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