On Wednesday, Slate published a piece by Matthew Yglesias about why D.C. is, essentially, a terrible place for young, creative people to live.
The article has since flown about social media, causing many a sad emoticon and, apparently, excessive vomiting. The jab is all the more painful because there is some truth to it–D.C. is [...]

Marcus J. Moore leads this week's arts section with his profile of Regi Allen, a senior editor at Discovery Channel who's looking to start FunkTV, the first urban alternative television network, which hopes will be a home to forgotten Blaxploitation films, independent music, and an original program he calls Fried Chicken Cinema. In theater: Bob [...]

So, for the second time today, I'm referencing Michael J. West on the blog. In his Jazz Setlist post, he writes, "[I]f you're still looking for something to do that night, you're in trouble. Everything that's not sold out is ridiculously high-priced (which is why it's not sold out)." Well, I've gotta disagree. [...]

Good morning, D.C.!
TBD recaps who did what about the Portrait Gallery drama over the weekend. Maura Judkis also has this: "In a letter to Secretary Wayne Clough, President Joel Wachs stated that the Warhol Foundation has given more than $375,000 to fund several exhibitions at various Smithsonian institutions. "We cannot stand by and watch the [...]

Watching dance in D.C. usually means picking between two modalities: drought and thunderstorm. During the dry summer months, virtually nothing is on the radar anywhere in town; then suddenly September arrives and there’s a deluge of intriguing-looking shows, so many that it’s impossible to see them all.
This weekend is a welcome exception. There are a [...]

Ford’s Theatre knew going into its revival of the well-worn, 60-year-old Sabrina Fair that a quaint, fizzy rumination on class just wouldn’t do. Even light romantic fare needs some bite, and so the theater made a casting decision that instead made the play about that other, more scarring division in American life: race. In the [...]

This week, I examine the new 9:30 Records, its unusual business model, and what that says about the recording industry. Amrita Khalid talks to Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth about the company's replacement for the canceled Imagining Madoff—it's another controversial play that happens to involve real-life analogues. For One Track Mind, Ryan Little chats [...]

Comedy troupe Second City's production of Barack Stars: The Wrath of Rahm (running through February 21 at Woolly Mammoth) plays with the ever-popular stories of the president and his crew. Much of the best work centers around Rahm Emanuel's ill-advised four-letter-word choices and inadvisable use of the "r"-word. Even though we've heard some of the [...]

THEATER: In the Red and Blue Water at the Studio Theatre, still on tonight; Stick Fly at Arena Stage, still on, with an extra show added; Beauty of the Father at GALA, still on; all shows at the Kennedy Center, canceled; I Am My Own Wife at the Signature Theatre, canceled; Last Cargo Cult at [...]

Trey Graham dissects the "artsy collage" of Woolly Mammoth's fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall story, Full Circle—"a production that breaks through theatrical boundaries as enthusiastically as the citizens of Berlin took that other barrier down two decades ago."
Ted Scheinman praises the National Opera's Ariadne auf Naxos, "a Strauss gem about the limitations of tragedy."
Also playing: Adding Machine: The Musical; [...]