Sharpenicity

  JUST WHAT THE GOOD DOCTOR ORDERED  AT WASHINGTON STAGE GUILD  Washington Stage Guild has just the thing to cure  whatever may ail you!  The Good Doctor   with its  pokes at the foibles of human nature. After all laughter  is the best of medicines.  All sorts of people inhabit Chekhov’s world of short stories which Neil Simon adapted in this play. There is the sexton with a toothache  in “Surgery” who visits an overzealous dentist  or desperate situations like  “A Defenseless Creature” where a a nervous woman harasses a banker  with a sore foot to extort money supposedly on behalf of  her injured husband. Special note to fight choreographer John Gurski for the fight scene in that one. There are accidents that lead to a nervous breakdown like  “The Sneeze”  and there are ordinary life events that escalate like when a mother tries to cheat payment due as in “The Governess.” Sometimes the setting is a park bench - as in the quiet “Two Late for Happiness” when an

               TINA - THE TINA TURNER MUSICAL  at The National Theatre              In the 1970s, I  had spent weeks climbing around ruins in Peru.  I heard music of the Andes all over.  I  was  finally at  Machu Picchu to spend the night so I could get up early  and climb to see the sunrise from the top of the ruins.   As I got to steps by the gatekeepe,  I could hear his boom box blaring across the Andes “I Wanna Take You Higher”  by Tina Turner.   You don’t have to go climbing the Andes to hear her songs — Tina-The Tina Turner Musical  isright here  at the National Theatre, Washington DC,  until  Oct. 23, 2022.    The show has broken all records with the awards it has received since in premiered in April 2018 in London.  No one questions that Tina is a musical legend but  for this show  accolades to  the stars Naomi Rodgers and Zurin Villanueva who alternate in the  spectacular role.   At every performance there will be people  who remember seeing Tina “back when” and

  Washington Stage Guild does it again with outstanding   Mrs. Warren’s Profession None of the characters in  George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession   agree with what  a woman should  do with her life.   No one will disagree that  the 2022 Washington Stage Guild production makes  it very clear that it is about CHOOSING their OWN  destinies. First written in 1893,  the play was not performed until 1902  because of government censorship over prostitution. Later the cast and crew were arrested by police in a 1905 performance for violating NYC’s version of the Comstock laws. The police report said it was shocking, but what was upsetting was not the profession (which is never stated)  but that society's treatment of women, that what drove them into that line of  work  should even be in question. Fast forward to the fight for the ERA, and change in law  that is long overdue, and that guarantees  equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex and ends the leg