'Bad Jews'
I was visiting my mother in Maryland again and I caught a matinee performance of Joshua Harmon’s Bad Jews at Washington’s Studio Theatre on Sunday, 16 November. The 90-minute one-act, under the...
View ArticleDispatches from Spain 1 & 2
by Rich Gilbert[My friend Rich Gilbert and his partner, Sallie Strang, moved to Madrid in October to live there for a half a year. (They expect to live another six months somewhere else in Europe, but...
View ArticleThe Kennedy Center Expands
The busiest performing arts venue in the United States isn’t in New York City (population, just under 8.5 million). It’s not in Los Angeles (3.8 million), or even in Chicago (2.7 million). It’s in...
View ArticleDispatches From Spain 3 & 4
by Rich Gilbert[This is the second installment of my friend Rich’s messages from Madrid. Like the first set, this post contains two e-mails and goes back a few weeks. Later “Dispatches” will be...
View Article'A Particle of Dread'
Okay, this may be it—the play on which I want to report but can’t figure out. It was bound to happen sooner or later, and at least I lasted over five years before I ran into this wall. Sometimes...
View ArticleDispatches from Spain 5
by Rich Gilbert[Rich Gilbert is back now with his latest installment of the e-mail reports on his and Sallie’s sox-month sojourn in Madrid. They’re now about one-third of the way through the...
View ArticleTheatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986
[In the mid-1980s, when I was working on a graduate degree in Performance Studies at New York University, I was hired to launch and edit the newsletter for a new organization for stage directors and...
View ArticleThe (Drag) King of Jazz
If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with David Henry Hwang’s 1988 Broadway play M. Butterfly, the story of a French embassy official in Beijing who has a decades-long affair with a...
View ArticleSpace Dogs
In the New York Times’ “Science Times” section of 4 November, Dana Jennings, an editor at the Times, published a review of a new book by Olesya Turkinacalled simply Soviet Space Dogs (translated from...
View Article'Visible Language': Signing (and Singing) a Musical
[Two schools of thought in teaching the deaf arose in the 19th century in Washington, D.C., symbolized by the leaders of those two intellectual streams: Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) and Edward...
View ArticleOutsider Art
[A number of years ago, on a visit to Baltimore with my mother, we checked out a new museum. I’m not sure what made us go to the American Visionary Art Museum—it may have been a recommendation from...
View ArticleDispatches from Spain 6
by Rich Gilbert[The continuing adventure of Rich and Sallie in Madrid, Spain, proceeds below. Check back for installments 1 & 2 (30 November 2014), 3 & 4 (10 December 2014), and 5 (20 December...
View ArticleThe National Museum of African Art
In the Washington Post early last November, there was a review of an exhibit of a private African-American art collection. The exhibit was at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art on the...
View Article'Choir Boy' (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.)
Once again I made the trip downtown in Washington to see a show at the Studio Theatre here. This was the matinee performance of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Choir Boy on Sunday, 11 January 2015, presented...
View ArticleA Confluence of Coincidences
I want to relate some coincidences that I’ve experienced in recent months. Most of us have run into these kinds of unanticipated and serendipitous encounters from time to time. When my family lived...
View ArticleCurtain Calls
by Kirk Woodward[Readers of ROT will be familiar with the writing of my friend Kirk Woodward by now: he’s contributed nearly 50 posts to the blog since I started it (at Kirk’s urging) in 2009. This...
View ArticleThe Cheapening of the Standing O
by Erin Woodward[I’m posting a new article by a Woodward, but this time it’s not my college buddy Kirk; it’s his daughter, Erin. Coincidentally, though, I’ve paired Erin’s disapproval of the over-used...
View ArticleThe First Amendment & The Arts, Redux
On 8 May 2010, I published a post on ROT called “The First Amendment & The Arts.” The title tells it all as far as what I was writing about. For those who don’t already know this about me, I’m...
View ArticleLittle Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 1
[The world-première production of the new musical Little Dancer began performances 25 October at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Theater. The opening was on 20 November...
View ArticleLittle Dancer, Inspired by Degas Sculpture, Premieres at Kennedy Center, 2
[I recently posted a collection of three Washington Post articles on the Kennedy Center première of a new musical, Little Dancer, inspired by the famous wax sculpture by Edgar Degas. The Post’s...
View Article