'Irma La Douce'
The third and last presentation in the 2014 Encores! Season of Broadway musicals in concert was Irma La Douce, which premièred in New York at the Plymouth Theatre (now the Gerald Schoenfeld) in1960 and...
View ArticleSock and Buskin & Cloak and Dagger, Part 1
A new cable-TV series started in April—Turn, the saga of espionage in the Revolutionary War. According to press coverage of the series (airing Sundays on AMC), this was the beginning of “the American...
View ArticleSock and Buskin & Cloak and Dagger, Part 2
[As promised at the end of Part 1, I’m back now with the completion of my account of actor-spies during the Civil War. As I said, this section covers spies who weren’t stage pros but used acting...
View ArticleThe Thomas Jefferson Memorial
Of all the monuments in my home town of Washington, D.C., my favorite is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial, probably one of the least well-known of all the historical markers in the Nation’s Capital. (I...
View Article'Cock'
I paid a visit to my mother in Bethesda, Maryland, in May and while I was there she and her theater companion had seats for a performance at Studio Theatre in the District, a theater I’ve attended and...
View Article“An Artist. A Town. Their Secrets.”
by Frances Stead Sellers[In May 2004, my mother and I drove to New York City from Washington, D.C., by way of Winterthur, the DuPont homestead near Wilmington, Delaware, and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania,...
View ArticleWinterthur & The Brandywine River Museum
[I originally wrote this report, part of a larger one on some performances and art exhibits, between 11-13 May 2004, years before I started ROT. Since the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.,...
View ArticleBlack Mountain College: Cradle of Postmodernism
[On 12 October 2011, I published an article on ROT about “Max and Gertrud Bondy,” educational innovators in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. In the introduction to that article, I likened...
View Article'Act One'
by Kirk Woodward[My friend Kirk Woodward is making another generous contribution to ROT, his report on the Lincoln Center Theater stage adaptation of Moss Hart’s autobiography, Act One, which he sawon...
View ArticleTwo (Back) Stage Pros
[When most people who aren’t part of the theater world—what one of my teachers fondly called “civilians”—see a play, they think of actors, singers, dancers, maybe directors, occasionally...
View ArticleThe Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians
By 1870, the world of the American Indian had become intolerable. A typhoid epidemic, along with other diseases of European origin to which the native Americans had no immunity, killed approximately a...
View Article“Gaithersburg Resident Pens, Produces Musical about Life in Retirement...
byJenn Davis[About a year-and-a-half ago, my mother moved to an assisted living residence in Bethesda, Maryland. There are a few theater vets (as well as some writers in various genres) among the...
View Article'Italian Futurism'
I brought my mom up to New York City for a visit in the middle of June and because it’d been so long since we took in a real art exhibit, we decided to go up to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on...
View Article'Mount Analogue'
Quite a number of years ago, when I was doing some continuing research on the stage director Leonardo Shapiro (about whom I’ve blogged quite a bit over the years of ROT), I came across a reference that...
View ArticleWords and Pictures?
Late last month, I went with my mom to see the movie Words and Pictures, which opened in New York in May but hadn’t come to the Washington area until early in June. I don’t normally write about film...
View Article“I Think Icon, I Think Icon”
by Nelson Pressley[The following article appeared in the Washington Post on22 December 2013 in the “Arts” section (sec. E). Nelson Pressley is a review writer for the Post and previously reviewed for...
View Article'Pageant' (1991)
[One day recently, when I was out and about, I spotted an ad on a phone booth in my neighborhood announcing the coming of a musical called Pageant. I’d been out of town for several weeks, so I hadn’t...
View Article“Broadway’s Musical Chairs”
by Gabriel Cohen[I’ve published articles on various backstage aspects of theater in the past, most recently “Two (Back) Stage Pros” on 30 June. I’ve also written about the pit orchestra and theater...
View ArticleTheater & Art
CHAMPAGNE LADY(13 February1989) [In early July, I watched a cable broadcast of Mae West’s I’m No Angel(1933). I thought of a play based on West’s career that I’d reviewed years ago—25, it turns...
View Article“Smell of the Greasepaint, The Funds of the Crowd”
by Patrick Healy [In another article on inside theater, the NewYork Times reports on innovations in financing commercial productions. This one started in London (where the laws are different) and is...
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