Sharpenicity

La Vie en Rose , the In Series collaboration with The Washington Ballet Studio Company,  is not your usual song and dance show.  Evoking Parisian life through the musical palette of modern French cabaret chansons and belle epoque art-songs, the work is imaginative, emotional and energetic.   The singers walk and move among the ballet dancers.  While this is not unusual in itself, it is conceptually  different from musicals where singers and dancers share a stage but are clearly distinct.   In La Vie en Rose , one might say the singers and dancers move together to the same tune. They breathe together.  What one sees is how the body  of the dancer and the voice of the singer are expressing the meaning of the song simultaneously.    The coordination of two separate arts in this highly creative staging is not simply keeping to the same beat of the music.  What the singers and dancers share is their breaths in what mig...

May the farce be with you. Constellation Theatre Company again lives up to its name by reaching  up into the universe of possibilities to mount Moliere’s Scapin as adapted by Bill Irwin and Mark O’Donnell. A trip in outer space would have less bumps than the rambunctious trip that the shrewd scheming servant Scapin leads his characters from exposition to coincidences to the inevitable chase finale. The razzling cast is led by Michael Glenn who as Scapin is the first zani, with the versatile  Bradley Foster Smith as the second zani.  The two servants will through a series of skits succeed in uniting people  as well as involving the audience in a parody of the theater, all at the expense of the pocketbooks and prides of their pompous masters. The ensemble cast --Megan Dominy and Ashley Ivey, Nora Achrati, Vanessa Bradchulis, Manu Kumasi, and Carlos Saldaña --are convincing actors especially as they move on a fantasy set created by  A.J. Guban, ...