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 [...]

Classical theater companies do plenty of things to update their Shakespeare. They edit it. They collide it. And most frequently: They simply change the time and setting.
For its current production of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare Theatre Company transplanted the comedy to a Cuban sugar plantation circa 1930, and in so doing it renamed two of the [...]

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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 [...]

Conductor John Eliot Gardiner has a reputation of being difficult to work with. His penchant for demeaning musicians cost him at least one job offer, director of the U.K.’s Opera North, when the orchestra flatly refused to play for him. This partly explains how one of the most prolific conductors of our time—he’s recorded more [...]

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 [...]

For last week's issue of Washington City Paper, I reported an oral history of the Kennedy Center's long-running production of Shear Madness. One of the topics that emerged in several interviews I conducted was the play's suggested ability to create new theatergoers from its attendees, many of whom, as students on school field trips, are seeing a professional theater [...]

Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser must be smartin' this weekend. In today's Washington Post, the Sunday Arts section unleashes a five-critic assault on the massive arts center's upcoming season. "Is the Kennedy Center playing it too safe?" reads the headline of Philip Kennicott's package-leading essay. If the answer was no, there'd be no point in asking.
Looking at [...]

In the world of theater marketing, successfully rolling out your season is an art. Sell it with a strong hook, and you can build serious buzz for your upcoming slate of plays and programming. But for those of us who cover theater, season announcements can get pretty old pretty quickly. In order to stay interested, [...]

You might ask yourself, "Is there a spiritual component to Far Out vs. Hot Dang?" The answer is no. You might note to yourself, "in a cosmological sense, the use of the words 'far' and 'hot' creates a mild paradox." You might be right. And y'know what, D.C.? We're glad you're thinking about us all [...]

There are plenty of reasons for an arts critic to leave town—say, vacation. OK, OK, all critics should see what's animating the national conversation from time to time—it can broaden and inform their perspective. But sometimes it feels like The Washington Post's reviewers are spending a bit too much time consuming art in other cities, [...]