Liesel Allen Yeager, Ben Cole and Scott Parkenson in Cock – Photo: Teddy Wolff
“This is a bit of a surprise,” marveled David Muse, artistic director of Studio Theatre, accepting the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Play during a ceremony held at the Lincoln Theatre Monday, April 6. His company’s 2014 production of Cock, Mike Bartlett’s drama about a gay man contemplating leaving his longtime same-sex partner for a woman, was an upset winner in the crown-jewel category that also included Studio’s most successful production ever, Bad Jews. Cock also defeated Olney Theatre’s Colossal, about the struggles of a gay college football player. Still, Olney’s production took home four awards, including Outstanding Original new play or musical.
Technically, Cock was one of two works crowned Outstanding Play at the 31st annual awards ceremony, presented by Theatre Washington to honor works that opened in 2014. For the first time, the Helen Hayes honored two people or productions in most of its leading categories, nearly doubling the number of awards in a slightly confusing process. Essentially, there are “Hayes” nominees, including Cock, or productions distinguished by a higher ratio of Actors’ Equity members to non-union contractors, and then there are “Helen” nominees, with fewer union members, often associated with smaller or newer companies. Most significant among the smaller “Helen” companies was Theater Alliance, which won seven awards, more than any other company. (Kennedy Center was second best, with five.)
Alliance’s wins included 2014’s other Outstanding Play, The Wonderful World of Dissocia, and Langston Hughes’s Black Nativity, one of three Outstanding Musicals honored. The other two were the result of a tie in the Hayes category: Kennedy Center’s Side Showand Signature Theatre’s Sunday in the Park with George. Side Show also won for its ensemble and costume designer Paul Tazewell, while Sunday won for its director, Matthew Gardiner, and lead actress, Brynn O’Malley.
Other winning highlights at the 31st annual ceremony: Erin Weaver, who won for her supporting work in the musical Ordinary Days at Round House Theatre and Mother Courage and Her Children at Arena Stage; Sam Ludwig as lead Hayes actor in Olney’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying; Barbara Walsh for her scarily good portrayal of the deranged fundamentalist mother in Studio Theatre’s 2ndStage Helen show Carrie: The Musical; Nanna Ingvarsson for her astounding performance in the one-woman tour-de-force The Amish Project, a Helen production from Rick Hammerly’s fledgling theater collective Factory 449; and e’marcus Harper-Short, honored for his musical direction of Theater Allance’s Black Nativity.
If there is one opera lost or won by its chorus and characters, it's George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess. In this perfect storm of a story, it's all about the tight-knit fishing community that cradles, carries, and sometimes condemns its own. It's only if you believe in their hardscrabble lives and insistence on dignity that you feel what it means to lose them. In this respect, the Washington National Opera's Porgy and Bess absolutely nails it.
Of course, it starts with the vision of director Francesca Zambello and her talent for bringing intimacy to grand themes. Here, those themes run the gamut of ill-fated love: Porgy's tragic devotion, Bess' addiction to the dangerous Crown, and the reality that no union can outrun death.
President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were upstaged by a gaggle of drag queens at the Kennedy Center Opera House during a performance of the French Revolution-set hit musical Les Misérables on Wednesday, June 11.
The couple’s appearance -- Trump’s first of the term at the historic venue -- coincided with a special fundraising night aimed at supporting the reportedly financially struggling arts institution.
According to the The Washington Post, ticket sales have slumped following Trump’s takeover of the storied institution, long considered a cornerstone of D.C.’s theater scene. Subscriptions for the upcoming season are down by $1.6 million -- roughly 36% -- compared to last year.
In a rehearsal room deep inside the Mead Center, Arena Stage's home in Southwest D.C., the cast and company of We Are Gathered are running through the new play by Tarell Alvin McCraney. Tape on the floor marks the dimensions of Arena's in-the-round Fichandler Stage, reimagined for the moment as a late-night gay cruising area in a park, where the play's two lovers, W. Tre and Free, first meet.
Watching intently from one side of the room, McCraney, the Academy Award-winning writer of Moonlight betrays little nerves or discomfort sharing the play-in-process with the small audience that's been invited to absorb and discuss.
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