Roger Catlin

It’s the painting Girl with a Flute, long attributed to Vermeer, that adorns the program cover of the Washington Stage Guild’s world premiere production of “An Unbuilt Life.” 

You meet in the hotel lobby and go up the elevator in two groups of 10 to the fourth floor. Once assembled there, you’re led to a community room where you take your seat around a table covered in clumps of black earth that we’ll soon come to learn is peat. Irish peat, from the bogs. Three hundred pounds of it, shipped from the Emerald Isle.

Somewhere between touring tribute acts and high-gloss Broadway jukebox musical bios are the more modest regional  musicals created to nominally perform the hits of a legacy pop act, in costume, adding biographical details as a story arc.

The American musical giant Duke Ellington wrote more than 1,000 compositions in his long career, and to mark the 125th anniversary of his birth in his native city, The Kennedy Center is determined to celebrate a lot of them. 

There’s an awful lot of death in opera, Timothy O’Leary, the general director of Washington National Opera, lamented on a recent opening night. And those plentiful tragedies are also often further burdened with overbearing scores, turgid storylines, super-large casts and strident if not shrill performances. 

The historical Coriolanus, if he existed at all, was Rome’s most fearsome fighter, trained as a child, excelling as a warrior-leader and able to conquer whole other cities sometimes single-handedly. Even so, James Finley, who portrays the title character in Shakespeare’s tragedy in an eye-opening co-production by the Avant Bard Theatre with Longacre Lea, may be working even harder.

“Pequeñas Infidelidades (Little Infidelidades),” the latest production at the tiny Teatro de La Luna on Georgia Avenue, is a nifty two-hander in which a couple seems to accidentally meet after years apart. Through their banter and barbs we eventually learn the truth behind their past union, their individual paths since and their current intent.

The dance school choices for students, I recall, were ballet and jazz tap. Ne’er the twain shall meet, as Kipling said of the east and west. 

The biggest drama at the GALA Hispanic Theatre this year didn’t happen on stage; it was the $250,000 that was stolen when its bank account was hacked and drained, threatening the long-serving Spanish-language performance space as its 50th anniversary approached.

Commedia dell’Arte was a theatrical style that developed in Italy more than 450 years ago. Intended for the lower classes, with exuberant physical movement, improvisation, lots of masks and stock characters like the Harlequin and Pulcinella, it was a celebratory perfect for the carnivale circuit.

What did our critic think of AMERICAN OPERA INITIATIVE: THREE 20-MINUTE OPERAS at Kennedy Center?

British playwright Mike Bartlett, born in 1980, takes up the legacy of London’s swinging 60s in his play Love Love Love currently running in a sharp, well-acted production at Studio Theatre.

Like many adoptees when they reach adulthood, Sun Mee Chomet had a desire to find her biological parent.

The nationally traveling version of the Broadway musical has made its Washington premiere at the Kennedy Center and is already attracting large crowds of adults and many children, some of which are attired in the costumes of its lead characters Elsa and Anna (though mostly Elsa).

The first Nutcracker appear at the Kennedy Center this year is from Ballet West, based in Salt Lake City. And as brisk and fresh as it feels, it comes as something of a surprise that its lineage goes back to the very first U.S. performance of what’s become the most popular ballet in the country by far. 

Michael Wilson’s adaptation of “A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas,” first staged in Houston but run for many years at Hartford Stage (where it has returned this season), has been a mainstay at the historic Fords since 2004.

Signature Theatre is helping expand the American Songbook to include rock and pop classics of a half century ago in cabaret shows this winter that will celebrate Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell and Burt Bacharach.

Out in an arid, underpopulated northeastern Brazil, an unusual but not entirely inconceivable love story plays out, presented as a kind of morality lesson or at least a cautionary tale. 

Virginia Woolf was onto something when she wrote her novel “Orlando: A Biography” 95 years ago — a tall tale of aristocracy and adventure for a poet who also happens to change gender. It rings true, too, in its adaptation by Sarah Ruhl, the clever and popular contemporary playwright whose version of the story was one of her earliest commissions in 1998.

They aren’t actually that in Whitney White’s concert cum critique “Macbeth in Stride” at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. But they do backup singing, some choreographed dance moves (by Raja Feather Kelly), reply and advise the lead and never quite leave the stage, itself dressed up like a spangly nightclub revue (set by Daniel Soule, lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew). In all, it seems perfect for that girl group from Detroit.