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Theatre Reviews

The Play-Goer: Twin Beach Players’ Barefoot in the Park

Join Neil Simon and local talent for this lovely and ­nostalgic stroll

Pam Shilling
 Spring has been dragging its feet across the region, but it’s sprung in Twin Beach Players’ production of Barefoot in the Park. Neil Simon’s lighthearted 1960s’ comedy about the first days of marriage between a free spirited bride and a buttoned-up groom is charming and full of laughs. This smart and masterfully written script sets up silly and wonderful situations fueled by lots of love — and too much Ouzo. 
article –   –  by Pam Shilling  – 4/18/18

The Play-Goer: Colonial Players’ Lucky Stiff

If you need a few laughs — and who doesn’t — grab your ticket 

Jim Reiter
         Colonial Players’ Lucky Stiff, a musical and comic charmer, is organized chaos. It takes precision to do comedy right. Director Eric Hufford’s production is laugh-out-loud funny not just because of the material — c’mon, if you read a story about a dead guy being shown around Monaco in a wheelchair, would you have laughed? — but because Hufford and his multi-talented, multi-character cast of 12 bring the story to life in sidesplitting ways large and small.
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 4/11/18

The Play-Goer: Compass Rose Theater’s Disgraced

How much of ourselves must we give up to coexist?

Jim Reiter
         It’s unusual for a play to have more relevance today than when it was written, but Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced, which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama, resonates powerfully in the context of current events that have awakened a deep-seated fear of dark-skinned, mustachioed people in many Americans.
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 3/8/18

The Play-Goer: Colonial Player’s Sex With Strangers

Is it real … or just virtual?

Jim Reiter
       First, the elephant in the room: Sex with Strangers is not about sex with strangers. Rather, it is about the author of a book, Sex with Strangers, created from a blog written by young millennial Ethan, then bedding a different woman each week for a year, on a dare. The play is about Ethan, his attitudes, his trustworthiness and his generation’s seeming inability to connect without being “connected.”
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 2/28/18

The Play-Goer: Ballet Theatre of ­Maryland’s Aladdin

This theater tells its stories in dance, music and fashion
Leigh Glenn
      It’s a Friday afternoon and opening night for Ballet Theatre of Maryland’s Aladdin is just a week away. Artistic Director Dianna Cuatto is working the company, Maryland’s sole professional ballet, on Act II and tweaking little things — the kinds of gestures, head positions and facial expressions — that will make the performance sing.
article –   –  by Leigh Glenn  – 2/22/18

The Play-Goer: 2nd Star’s Musical Comedy Murders of 1940

The acting is tight, the pace is fast, the one-liners fly and people die

Jim Reiter
      Take some Neil Simon-like one liners, add a dash of the door-slamming slapstick of Noises Off, mix with some World War II political intrigue, a bunch of mistaken identities and hidden passages in a dark mansion, and what do you get? The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, running through February 24 at the Bowie Playhouse. 
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 2/15/18

The Play-Goer: A Humorous Romp through the Wintertime of Life

The Colonial Players’ Quartet

Leigh Glenn
        January has its own distinctive doldrums, and above a certain latitude (not everyone retires to the sunny south) and beyond a certain age, these doldrums can feel especially bleak. Talents diminish, good friends move away or pass over, and if those talents and friends were an integral part of your life purpose — especially if they were more of a goad — you can feel quite lost.
article –   –  by Leigh Glenn  – 1/18/18

The Shape of Water

A beautiful fairy tale for fish out of water 

Diana Beechener
     Orphan Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins: Maudie) knows hard times. Mute since a childhood throat slashing, she works as an unnoticed janitor at a secret government facility in Baltimore.       Her life ticks by in lonely minutes until agent Strickland (Michael Shannon: Nocturnal Animals) introduces an amphibious humanoid called the Asset. Worshiped as a god in South America, the Asset was captured to add to America’s Cold War arsenal. 
article –   –  by Diana Beechener  – 12/21/17

The Play-Goer: Fiddler on the Roof

The grand classic turns intimate 

Jim Reiter
      Fiddler on the Roof, which hit Broadway in 1964, set longevity records, won nine Tony Awards and has been performed thousands of times by high school and community theaters across the country. It’s usually a big musical with big casts. This month, Compass Rose Theater gives Tevye and his family a more intimate treatment that, in the hands of director Lucinda Merry-Browne, gives us a nice new perspective.
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 12/13/17

The Play-Goer: It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play

The Colonial Players’ fresh take on this classic offers laughs, emotion and good doses of nostalgia

Jim Reiter
       What’s Christmas season without nostalgia? What’s nostalgia except a look back at how things were? Or, for George Bailey of Bedford Falls, a look back at how things might have been?
article –   –  by Jim Reiter  – 12/6/17
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Format: 2019-06-20
Format: 2019-06-20
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