Validation: Arena Stage's Board of Trustees has announced that artistic director Molly Smith and managing director Edgar Dobie will stay on at least another five years. Smith will maintain her title; Dobie will assume the role of executive producer. Board chair David E. Shiffrin says, "It is clear to all of us on the Board [...]
On the cover of this week's issue is our collaboration with the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington, wherein we recommend some important (and mostly tiny) nonprofits worthy of your charitable giving. This includes some art picks, like the African Continuum Theatre Co., the Atlas Performing Arts Center, Step Afrika!, and WSC Avant Bard.
Chris Klimek leads [...]
GUYS, Some People Are Funny, This Guy Is ON IT: Earlier this month, The New York Times launched a new column on comedy, penned by Jason Zinoman, who is the son of Studio Theatre founder Joy Zinoman and author of Shock Value, a recent book about horror movies. Splitsider has a long, sometimes funny interview with Jason [...]
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Arena Stage played host Saturday evening to some super-wonky yakking that started out with 140-character thoughts on theater but quickly expanded to cover all aspects of theater journalism. Peter Marks, The Washington Post's sometimes curmudgeonly lead critic, and Howard Sherman, a former executive director of the American Theatre Wing [...]
In today's Washington Post, Peter Marks and Jacqueline Trescott broke the announcement that Arena Stage has removed two shows from its schedule next spring. One, a musical version of the Laura Esquivel novel Like Water for Chocolate, was postponed over creative difficulties. But the other, Tazewell Thompson's new play Mary T. and Lizzy K., has been [...]
Cheap Tickets, Please: D.C.'s Office of Human Rights is stepping into the fray over discounted theater tickets for young audiences, following a complaint it received about venues capping the definition of "young" at 30 or 35 years old, the Washington Business Journal reports. The city agency started looking at theater prices across town, and has [...]
Symposiugh: Peter Marks thinks that the lineup of Arena Stage's conference of theater-world luminaries was pretty damn impressive—or, well, he's pretty sure it would've been, had he been allowed to attend. The critic writes in the Post that, for murky reasons, Arena barred media and the public from attending the gathering. "Certainly, Arena and its [...]
The New York-based experimental theater company Mabou Mines’ puppet-assisted production of Peter & Wendy, which played at Arena Stage in 2007, was a perfect union of format and material, one that didn’t skimp on the darkness at the heart of J.M. Barrie’s tale of a boy who refuses to grow up. Maubou Mines DollHouse—the [...]
Talking Occupy D.C. Blues: In WaPo, David Montgomery talks to some of the musicians playing their own material at or on the occasion of Occupy D.C., writing, "The first singles on the soundtrack of the revolution are being written on the fly and downloaded as we speak. Every songwriter secretly hopes to compose an anthem worthy [...]
At once sobering and edifying, Alice Childress’ 1957 Trouble in Mind, currently running at Arena Stage, is a biting backstage satire of the theater world of the 1950s.
The play forces us consider the internal struggles that artists of color face during theater rehearsals. Here, a white director leads a well-meaning but stereotype-ridden drama about lynching, forcing the [...]
