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