What: Jack Marshall, the guy who compiles the exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) audience guides at The American Century Theater, sits down for an onstage chat with three of D.C.'s very best working actors: Kate Eastwood Norris, Naomi Jacobson, and Rick Foucheux.

Why: At one point or another, I've interviewed (or at least leaned against a lobby bar with) everybody involved, so trust me when I say they've got stories to tell -- and not all of them are high-toned meditations on craft.  So go check it out; I'd say "See you there," but that would be a lie, 'cause it's my anniversary, and somehow my already overtaxed credit card and I have managed to snag reservations at Komi.

When: Tonight, 8 o'clock
Where: Theatre Lab, 733 8th Street NW Washington, DC 20001. Check the Google map below.
How much: Pay-What-You-Can, to benefit The Arts Fund for Child Health and Development, run by psychologist (and DC-based actor) Brian Razzino.

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Glen Weldon, who's been writing about theater for City Paper since January 2007, was awarded a two-week fellowship at the Annenberg NEA Arts Institute at the University of Southern California. The program, according to the announcement, provides "intensive training for theater critics and their editors who work outside the country's major media markets." Ouch! Hey, Jake Tapper works in D.C.! That's major, right? ANYWAY, I was gonna call him and do a proper interview, but then I thought, Hey, why kill myself? I asked Glen to write up an interview with himself. And if you don't want to read that, at least spend some time with three of my favorite reviews he's done:

• The Price and Portia Coughlin (3/21/08)
• Maria/Stuart and Jerry Springer: The Opera (8/29/08)
• The "Beckett Duo" (11/7/08)

Glen even sent a headline, which, characteristically, I declined to use.
CP Theater Reviewer to Hie His Pasty Ass Out to L.A. for NEA Fellowship Thingy
Read More "CP’s Weldon Receives NEA Fellowship" »

The performers you see on area stages? They're professionals. They work their tails off to entertain you, to move you, to get it right night after night.

Sometimes that can be dull. Sometimes that can lead to moments like this one, in which singer Tracy Lynn Olivera -- currently appearing as Fantine in the Signature Theatre's production of Les Misérables -- tries out an, erm, un-canonical reading of the character's signature aria, "I Dreamed a Dream," during a January put-in rehearsal:

I'm hearing like three or four different parody styles there -- is that a Beyoncé she pulled, right around the minute mark, and did it segue into a Patti LuPone? -- and damn if they're not all pretty well executed.

Curse you, Tracy Lynn: Isn't it enough that you're talented in one genre?

Hat-tip to Weslie Woodley and other 'Les Miz' cast members, whose Facebook hysterics alerted me to this gem ...

City List mistakenly listed Studio Theatre's Grey Gardens as closing on Dec. 21--wrong, wrong, wrong. The play runs until Jan. 4 at Studio Theatre. Here's what Trey Graham had to say about it:

Based on the cult-favorite Maysles brothers documentary about two socialites (Jackie O’s relatives, even!) rotting away in a vermin-plagued, plumbing-challenged East Hampton manse, Grey Gardens is as rococo in its better stretches as it is sappily sentimental in its lesser, as conventional and predictable in its first half as it is challenging and adventurous in its second. The true-story tragedy of Act 2 is a haunting, moving thing. Act 1, which still feels like an overlong preface despite the creators’ efforts to lay some explanatory psychological groundwork there—marital discord! engagement-party scandal! drunk sissy pianists!—plays more like a standard-issue drawing-room farce shorn of the usual upbeat, unravel-the-misunderstandings curtain scene.

With those imbalances, and in a space the size of Studio’s 200-seat Metheny Theatre, an entire evening with Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale (aka the quirky bohemian heiress Big Edie) and her permanently apron-strung namesake (the downright demented Little Edie) is a bit like a dinner à trois with, say, the merely operatic mid-career Norma Desmond and her full-on batshit twilight-years self: stimulating, and even a bit tragic, but perhaps a little too much for anyone but a real devotee.

Grey Gardens shows Thursdays–Saturdays at 8:30 p.m. and Sundays at 7:30 p.m. $49–$69. Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. (800) 494-8497.

Ask the average ex-evangelical Protestant what he misses most from his time in the Jesus Freak scene, and chances are he'll muse about the music. Outsiders find the hands-in-the-air routine creepy and cultish, but I sometimes miss the goosebumps and sense of elation that I felt during the crescendos on "Open the Eyes of my Heart, Lord," "I could Sing of you Love Forever," or "The Heart of Worship."

Cheap nostalgia is one of the reasons I enjoyed Altar Boyz, the Jesus-fueled, boy-band satire playing at Bethesda Theatre.

Read More "Take me Home, Altar Boyz" »

As some of you probably noticed yesterday, City List drops the ball every once in a while. Call it a sin of omission or too few hands on deck, we simply don't get into the section everything that we should. And it just so happens that City List missed a really important event for two weeks running: Gallaudet University's The Snow Queen. We're telling you about it here, on City Desk, because City List takes pride in listing independent repertory events, and because the play's last shows are tonight and tomorrow.

Why is this play important? For starters, it's not at the Kennedy Center, it doesn't feature any famous people, and this isn't its last stop before it heads back to Broadway. The Snow Queen is an important play because its cast is made up partially of deaf actors, because the proceeds from the play go to scholarships, and because the play features people flying. You probably won't see another play with all three of these elements for a very long time (see flying here).

Find out more information about the Snow Queen at Gallaudet University.

Don't know yet if we're going to have time/space/money in the print paper to re-review The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which is getting a much-deserved revival at the H Street Playhouse.

So let this be your cue: Go buy a ticket. The April-May run of Stephen Adly Guirguis' play was probably the single most thrilling piece of theater I've seen all year.

I mean: I'm a jaded 40-year-old theater critic, with a bad attitude most days, and I've been to more bad plays this year than I had bad one-night stands back in my 20s. And I cried like a damn baby at this show.

I'm telling everybody I know to go see it. I'm even pimping this play (which, y'know, isn't exactly PG) to the public-TV audience. Here's the script for my Best Bet on on WETA's Around Town, which I'm going over to Shirlington to tape in a few hours:

Something new opens in DC theaters pretty much every week, so I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on shows I've already reviewed -- especially shows that closed back in May. I'm gonna make an exception this week, though, for The Last Days of Judas Iscariot -- because it's coming back. And if you love the reach and the ambition and the intimacy and the power that makes theater theater, you really must go see this show. It's the story of the trial of Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, and it's set in a court in Purgatory. The judge is a dead Confederate who hanged himself on the day Lee surrendered; the witnesses include Mother Teresa, Sigmund Freud, Santa Monica and the Devil himself. This play -- it's a meditation on the tension between divine mercy and human free will -- is funny, and moving, and profane, and sad, and oh, man, the way it uses *language* -- it's just downright intoxicating, and it was the best thing I saw onstage this year. The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, revived with all of the original cast all but one of the original cast*, at the H Street Playhouse to December 21.

The WETA audience won't see that until next week, after the show has opened. But you's my CP peeps, so you get the first heads-up.

Seriously: Go spend an evening with Judas. My original review is over here in the CP archive, if you need more convincing.

*Whoops. Got a call from Michael Dove. Turns out Maggie Glauber's having twins, and -- though initially it *was* supposed to be the whole original cast -- she won't be playing Mother Teresa again. My bad.

The allure of spaces like Round House Silver Spring, of course, is that you can do an intimate show in them.

One drawback, however: If you're running just a teeny bit late for your own show, you may find yourself hurrying past the queued-up patrons.

At 15 minutes before your announced curtain time.

Because there's not so much a stage door.

The Stranger's Brendan Kiley offers 10 suggestions. No. 7? "Build bars."

Photo by Flickr user A Clear Blue Sky

Princess Leia! Wasn't she the one who saved the universe despite being, like, C-3PO's daughter or something? Well guess what? PRINCESS LEIA IS BACK!!!!!

Except now she lives in the D.C. area and is you.

In anticipation of Leia-portraya Carrie Fisher's one-woman show Wishful Drinking, which will bow Sept. 5, Arena Stage is holding a Princess Leia lookalike contest. Just take a picture of yourself dressed like Luke Skywalker's girlfriend or whatever (but don't stick Cinnabons on your ears and hold a spray bottle, because some wag has beaten you to it), and e-mail it here by Sept. 7, and you could win tickets to the show or at least bring a signed poster from Wishful Drinking back to your little robot farm on Tatooine.

Those are fleeting pleasures, though, compared to the pride you'll feel when your coworkers see you dressed like one of Jabba the Hutt's hootchies. Hey, those aren't the droids you're looking for!

The third annual Capital Fringe Festival opens tonight with a slate of 120 productions over 18 days at 20 venues in theaters, bars, tents and defunct Italian restaurants around town.  City Paper will be covering the chaos on its Fringe & Purge blog, with veteran critics like Trey Graham and Glen Weldon, online producer Ted Scheinman and myself, as well as a phalanx of guest bloggers who will help us report back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year's festival.  

I'm actually at Fort Fringe as I type--formerly known as A.V. Ristorante Italiano--which the festival folks have artfully transformed into their guerilla headquarters, complete with offices in a crumbling bar, a two-tiered tent deemed the Baldacchino in the parking lot, and a permanent black box theater in what used to be a meat-curing pantry.  I will be blogging live from here until the shows begin this evening--so if you want to know if the toilets will be working in time for the opening night party later, you know where to look for updates.

Oh yeah, there's a party: 9 PM at Fort Fringe, 607 New York Avenue NW.  But really this festival is all about the performances, so turn off your computers, get off your rolling chairs, and go check out a show or two or twenty.  Then visit Fringe & Purge and let everyone know what you thought.  

This past Thursday, to prodigious applause and a minimal throwing of old fruit, the City Paper launched its 2008 Fringe & Purge blog.

Ever since, we've been positively inundated with questions, compliments, and offers of a decidedly salacious nature. Rather than responding individually, I've decided to offer some answers right here, for all to see.

After the jump:

Read More "Fringe & Purge Launch" »