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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, [...]

I fielded an interesting call last week from a theater in the D.C. area: What, the theater wanted to know, was my policy on critics tweeting?
This was the impetus: One of Washington City Paper's critics saw a play there, reacted strongly during the first act, tweeted about it during intermission, and then sat down for [...]

Come Monday, you'll probably read in the Washington Post that at long last, the Studio Theatre has announced a replacement for retiring Artistic Director Joy Zinoman. But if you're like me, your Mondays can be hectic, so let me save you a little time: The name they'll announce is that of David Muse.
How do [...]