Ossie Davis’ antebellum South-skewering farce Purlie Victorious debuted on Broadway in September 1961, just under four years before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law and not quite 65 years before the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerated it. Chief New York Times critic Howard Taubman’s rave opened like this: “It is marvelously […]

Thursday: Kali Malone at the Memorial Chapel The University of Maryland School of Music once again hosts its 10th annual International Conference on Music and Minimalism, which includes numerous panelists, lectures, and performances. The centerpiece is a concert and conversation with Kali Malone, an experimental composer and musician. Malone will be performing her haunting 2024 […]

It’s May—the month we celebrate our Mamma Mia’s, who, in most cases, introduced us to the joys of live theater. What better way to say thank you for schlepping us […]

As an acting student at Greensboro College in North Carolina, Justin Weaks was assigned to research a major American theater market and report on everything from the type of work its companies put on to the cost of renting an apartment. As fate would have it, Weaks’ professor assigned them Washington, D.C. “It really excited […]

Spring is upon us in all its color and warmth. It’s great to be outside, I know, but let’s not forget all of the sparkling theater to be had inside […]

Jonah, a memory play from Rachel Bonds, is an absorbing riddle. For one thing, the character called Jonah isn’t its subject. He might not even be, within the schema of this fiction, real. Bonds surely has her reasons for not naming this nonlinear tale Ana, after the woman it follows through discrete phases of her […]

Phone usage is a problem at live theater performances—it’s even incurred the wrath of Patti LuPone on Broadway—but there’s no danger of cellular interruptions during Octet at Studio Theatre. Appropriately enough for a show about digital dependency, phones are locked in pouches for the duration of the performance. Octet is a chamber musical performed without […]