Keith Tittermary - Page 3

"Can you fall in love if you don't know what love is?" That question is the central theme in the new play, (a love story), playing as part of the Source Festival.  Playwright Kelly Lusk has woven an intricate look at the lives of three couples, who seemingly are unrelated. The impetus of which is the question of "do you know what love is?" You have the popular high school girl in love with the emo-loner, two gay teenagers awakening their feelings, and an older couple who meet and fall in love through on-line anonymity.

If the dystopian future of Robert O'Hara's new satirical look of American politics come true, there will be a few changes to the nation as we know it. The Presidency will return to Lordships and Ladies due to removing all nuclear weapons because of the 'India Incident'. The west coast of the US will be in a civil war against the east, Cotton XP will be a prime commodity, the United African Nations will want to invade the US, and oh, there are zombies running a shadow government in the basement of the White House (which now resides inside Mount Rushmore).

Sadness and joy is a recurring motif in music. In Jan Marans' provocative play, Old Wicked Songs, it is a motif that is played out both figuratively and musically. In Marans' play Viennese music professor Josef Mashkan points out that only those who have suffered can truly emote beautiful music. Countries that have seen centuries of war and oppression can express music more passionately than those that haven't (which, he claims is why there are no true great British, American, or Japanese composers).

When Sarah Ruhl was a student at Brown University, she embarked on a journey that would culminate in her sprawling epic, Passion Play, which was first performed at Arena Stage in 2005. Her three act tome tells the story of a group of actors performing the story of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Each act is set in a different time frame, yet what happens off-stage, which vaguely mirrors the actions on stage, is the heart of the story.

Big musicals are a rarity to come by. Shows with huge sets, large casts, and a Hollywood sized orchestra are a thing of the past. But all of these are on display at NextStop Theatre Company's recent production of Gutenberg! The Musical! Well, at least there are on display in the minds of aspiring playwrights, Doug Simon and Bud Davenport.

In January, the national tour of Disney's Beauty and the Beast returns to our area after a successful run at Wolf Trap earlier this year. The show will play at the Historic Warner Theatre in Penn Quarter from January 6 - 11.

I once saw a production of Samuel Beckett's play, Play, that featured three "urns" and as a young college student I had never seen something so remarkable before. It was odd and extraordinary, and while I don't remember much about that production, the visual has stayed with me for years. Sunday evening I saw Studio Theatre's 2nd Stage production of Mark O'Rowe's Terminus, and I immediately thought of that. O'Rowe's somewhat grotesque poetically prosed piece is comprised of three unnamed characters who like those urns in Play talk directly to us. The difference here is that they are in monologue form and the three characters never interact with each other as their speaking.

One Man, Two Guvnors, the British import that wowed audiences in New York in 2012, has landed in Tysons! 1st Stage in Tysons has assembled a show that is a combination of farce, improv, and music hall, is the complete evening that will make you roll in the aisles with laughter.

The Washington, DC metro area is full of small risk taking theaters and one of the standouts in this crowd is Molotov Theatre Group. Self-proclaimed as "America's Second Oldest Theatre of Grand Guignol" this little in size, but big in execution theatre is probably the best in the Theatre of Grand Guignol niche.

I Capuleti e i Montecchi, the two act Italian opera by Vincenzo Bellini, is a delightful and tragic retelling fn those famous Shakespearean star-crossed lovers. Although the libretto (by Felice Romani) is based not on the original Shakespeare, but a combination of Italian adaptations, most notably the 1530 novella Giulietta e Romeo by Luigi Di Porto and the subsequent play by Luigi Scevola, and to a lesser degree the forgotten Nicola Vaccai opera.

The late August Wilson is one of America's greatest playwrights. From the early 1980s up until his death in 2005, Wilson wrote 10 plays, each encompassing African American life in a different decade focusing on the same Pittsburgh neighborhood, with Ma Rainey's Black Bottom being the sole play to occur outside of Pittsburgh. These 10 plays when put together are known as The Pittsburgh Cycle or Century Cycle, and is considered some of the 10 best plays ever written by an American playwright.

'If Danny Kaye had not been born,' a Hollywood writer once observed, 'no one could possibly have invented him. It would have been stretching credibility far past the breaking point'. Those words begin almost every biography of the legendary Danny Kaye and it is fitting words. Kaye may not have been as popular as Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, or may have been the person to get when Donald O'Connor wasn't available, but Kaye left a legacy on entertainment. You can narrow down to a handful of influential artists whose legacy is still being found in modern day entertainers. You can see pieces of Kaye in early Robin Williams, or Will Ferrell in his Saturday Night Live days. Kaye took the 'song and dance' man routine and went one step further - the patter song and the foppish mannerisms that made his style unique.

Not since Carrie. A phrase that has haunted creators of musicals ever since Ken Mandelbaum's famous 1991 book that looks at 40 years of Broadway musical flops. The original Broadway production in 1988 was a disaster, partly due to the writing, but more to do with original director Terry Hands' disastrous approach and minimalist concept. Closing 5 performances after the official opening night, Carrie cleaned up its blood, but not its money and went on to become one of the most famous and financial flops (although a certain Bono-tuned superhero of recent memory has surpassed that).

Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Letts loves the idea of a dysfunctional family. In his most famous work, August: Osage County, Letts gives us a glimpse into the well-to-do Weston family as they cope with pain and sorrow. In his first produced play, Killer Joe, Letts shows us the pain and sorrow caused by a down-on-their-luck family in Texas. The rarely produced play (and rarely seen 2011 movie) is dark and gritty both in context and character. The dysfunctional family at the 'heart' of the story centers around Ansel and Sharla, his hot young second wife; his two children: Chris, who is in constant trouble, and the slow Dottie; and the title character - a Dallas detective who moonlights as a hitman.

In 1994, the newly formed Disney Theatrical Group opened Disney's Beauty and The Beast on Broadway at the Palace Theater and became the eighth longest running Broadway show, when it ultimately closed in 2007. Since its inception, this 'tale as old as time' has played everywhere from elementary schools to international opera houses. Now at Wolf Trap, the NETworks Presentations, LLC touring company is playing through Sunday on their final leg of their national tour before taking the summer off.

British playwright Mike Bartlett is a wordsmith. He has an ability to tell a story through dialogue and stage direction that it completely unique to anything else. He has had quite a few success in London, notably, King Charles III, a three hour epic about the eventual rise of the Prince of Wales. He called it a 'future history play' mimicking the history plays of Shakespeare.

As part of the Kennedy Center's World Stages, International Theater Festival, the National Theatre of Iceland, presented this tragic tale of the love and loss in a riveting 90-minute performance in the Terrace Theater. Written by Icelandic playwright Mikael Torfason, the play starts as the audience arrives: two characters frozen in a moment of vulnerability, the man, half naked and clutching a phone with a look of despair, and the woman, standing in the kitchen dressed for a night on the town.