Evann Normandin - Page 2

Verdi's sumptuous epic AIDA graces the Kennedy Center for the first time in more than 25 years, and it is a knock-out. The three hour visual and auditory spectacle helmed by director Francesca Zambello and conductor Evan Rogister with original sketches and concept design by famed visual artist RETNA and choreography by one of contemporary dance's leading voices Jessica Lang is not to be missed. In her director's note, Francesca Zambello speaks to AIDA's appeal with opera lovers as part of the very "fabric of our beings", but you surely don't have to be a lover of opera to fall in love with this ensemble and creative team.

BIG FISH fills every inch of the intimate Keegan Theatre and leaves more than a little magic in its wake. Based on the 1998 David Wallace novel and the 2003 Tim Burton film, BIG FISH revolves around traveling salesman Edward Bloom and the big stories he tells to his realist son Will. When Will finds out he's going to be father and must, at the same time, confront his father's mortality, he sets out to separate fact from fiction and find the man inside the behemoth.

A night of storytelling under the stars was just the way to celebrate a respite from this terrible heat wave. On Wednesday July 26th at 8 pm hundreds of fans, young and old, gathered at Wolf Trap Filene Center to watch master artists Regina Spektor and Ben Folds hit all the right notes.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company's stunning remount of AN OCTOROON by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, directed by Nataki Garrett reunites the principal cast and production teams from Woolly's sold out 2016 run. Boy, did I move to DC just in time. The Washington Post declares Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company 'a national champion of the new-and frequently provocative-American play' and after laughing, crying, and thinking through Woolly's AN OCTOROON I would be hard pressed to find better descriptors. In the heart of the nation's capital, a stone's throw from The White House, AN OCTOROON is a living, breathing, vital dialogue about racial tension in America.

Horton Foote's NIGHT SEASONS, directed by Jack Sbarbori at the Quotidian Theatre Company, examines the nature of a life defined by money and greed, and the notion that perhaps living is the greatest punishment of all. Foote, best known for his 1962 screenplay for To Kill a Mockingbird, delivers a quiet critique of capitalist culture and asks us to consider what "home" means. NIGHT SEASONS places us in Harrison Texas, 1963 on Josie Weems' (Jane Squier Bruns) 93rd birthday, though the play deals in flashbacks and the setting easily slips back and forth through 1923-1963 and the years in between. Josie Weems (Jane Squier Bruns) is the manipulative glue that holds the rambling Weems family together by subtly managing finances and allowing and prohibiting marriages at her discretion.

The DC premiere of WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND UNAFRAID directed by Marie Byrd Sproul in her Keegan Theatre directing debut is nothing if not timely. The play is set on Whidbey Island off the cost of Washington State in 1972, but the remote location and blaring seventies music only highlights the eerie resonance of playwright Sarah Treem's work. In a time before battered women's shelters and legal recourse against male abusers, Agnes (Sheri S. Herren) runs a Bed and Breakfast with a basement entrance for victims of domestic abuse. Her most recent runaway, Mary Anne (Jenna Berk), arrives with an angry gash on her forehead and begins to shape the mind of Agnes' daughter Penny (Kaylynn Creighton) with her acquiescent and yet militantly tactical approach to dating. WHEN WE WERE YOUNG AND UNAFRAID does not deal in black and white: Treem's arguments are nuanced and delicately fashioned. Violence against women is at times as loud as the gash on Mary Anne's forehead and as quiet as Agnes' cheerful suggestion that her industrious daughter Penny ask a boy to the prom.