Sharpenicity

T HE WOLVES Sarah DeLappe’s award winning play The Wolves doesn’t just tell about teamwork—it shows it!   Studio Theatre’s production of The Wolves is a great team  of actresses working together with a great director and creative team and coming up a winner. The Wolves are a girls’ soccer team who have an undefeated record.  #2 (Merissa Czyz),  #25 (Chrissy Rose), #11( Lindsley Howard),  #13 (Sarah Turner), #36 (Jane Bernhard), #7 (Katie Kleiger), # 14 (Maryn Shaw), #8 (Shanta Parasuraman), and #00 (Gabby Beans)  stretch and squat and banter about everything they can think of—and a lot of time like they aren’t thinking at all.  They throw up, bleed, get injuries.  They are smart, sassy, funny, angry, and compassionate.  Fearful and brave, they are trying to find their own strengths and sensibilities.   Anne Bowles is the soccer mom whose brief appearance signals their entry into the bigger life game that is outside of Sat...

TOSCA—THE OPERA OR THE TOUR As glamorous as the settings of Tosca are, they are also authentic. Recent productions have missed that point in creating rather dull minimalist  stagings   — something that the Met has now admitted as they return  to the scenes of the opera as Puccini saw them.   A quick google search  turns up  a self guided tour  of Tosca ’s locations. In Act I,  Tosca moves from  the chapel in the church of Sant'Andrea al Quirinale in Rome on the afternoon of 17 June 1800 Sant’Andrea della Valle is a Baroque basilica designed in 1524.   Ornate—white marble, gold stucco, enormous frescos of the life of the saint, the church is near Piazza Navona.   Next act,  Tosca is in chamber in the Palazzo Farnese on the evening of 17 June 1800,  before going to  a country villa that night. Palazzo Farnese is close by to the Sant’Andrea della Valle.  The  sumptuous Renaissa...

The Skin of Our Teeth The Antrobus family might be an ordinary American family but the cast at Constellation for Skin of Our Teeth is simply superb! There is a husband and wife, George and Maggie (Steven Carpenter and Lolita Marie)  and their two children—a scarred boy —Henry —and the perfect girl— Gladys. (Dallas Tolentino and Malinda Kathleen Reese).  Clue is that Henry was once called Cain. Then there’s the maid, Sabina (Tonya Beckman), a combination of  Lillith and the Sabine women.    Everyone wants to get into the act.  In Thornton Wilder’s absurdist American classic Skin of Our Teeth,  they do.    For starters, there are such unlikely characters as a baby dinosaur and a wooly mammoth.  Along comes Moses and the three Muses.  There’s a fortune teller and Plato.   All have their place in the lives of the Antrobus family  in telling this story that moves from their home in Excelcior, Ne...

THE WAY OF THE WORLD You can take the characters out of their place in Restoration high society, but you can’t get rid of the sex, lies and luxury that goes along with them.   That is what Theresa Rebeck has done with William Congreve’s great Restoration comedy, which she has freely adapted and directed, and is now playing at the Folger Theatre. The staging is stunning, set in the boutique beach setting of the Hamptons in summer—an envious spot to be in but particularly now in the midst of Washington’s blustery windy winter.     Kristine Nielsen is simply smashing as Aunt Rene, who knows the numbers—whether it is the $600 million dollars of her niece Mae has inherited (played by a believable altruistic Eliza Huberth) or the convincingly inconstant wanna be husband Henry   (Luigi Sottile). The klatch of their friends who tell it as it is—that is gossip and scandal of course—include Brandon Espinoza as Charles , Elan Zafir as Reg, Erica Dorf...

Terracotta Army: Legacy of the First Emperor of China at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts  The two best loved visitors to the United States from China are the Pandas and the Terracotta Army.   While the pandas lie around their zoo enclosures chewing what looks like a very long toothpick of bamboo all day,   inspiring smiles and giggles, the clay warriors stand quietly in museum exhibits,   conquering all who view them.   Most recently ten of those  warriors out of the estimate 8,000 found in the necropolis built for the Emperor Qin Shihuang in the Chinese province of Xi’an Shaanxi, (along with over 130 related works of art) arrived at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Qin Shihuang appears to have been practical, paranoid and pleasure loving in this world, but he could never have imagined  in his quest for immortality, that he would be so popular 2,000 years later.   Or that the warriors  who were  intended to acco...

Les Misérables   Les Misérables — despite its title which means  “the wretched” —  is wondrous!  This new production of the phenomenon known as Les Miz brings a much needed spark of hope of the possibilities of love to hearts that have been broken or whose hopes have been dashed by the exigencies of life.    Les Miz ’s music is haunting as befits the life journey of selfless sacrifice leading to salvation for one man and the tragic ending of the obsession of another.   It calls for a complex web of characters employing wide   vocal choices   to follow the stories of these two men who are engaged in a life long bitter tug of war.   The dramatic tenor role of Jean Valjean is most poignantly sung by Nick Cartell.   Valjean has suffered a great injustice in   being imprisoned for   19 years for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread.   He escapes for a   life of hiding from his relentless pursuer, the c...

HANSEL AND GRETEL—THE OPERA Hansel and Gretel is so many things.   A folk tale adapted by the Grimm brothers,  Englebert Humperdinck’s beloved opera, and even a 20th century novel of  the nightmare of the Nazi era.    The Met Live In HD rebroadcast of its 2008 production puts this tale of these two hungry kids with sweet tooths lost in the dark woods into a different light.  Food is the theme for the three scenes set in three different kitchens. The opener is the home of Hansel and Gretel, (Alice Coote and Christine Schäfer) and most appropriates for  the folksy qualities of poor family (the father is a seller of brooms and brushes not a woodcutter).   The “real” kitchen  has been compared to the kitchen in the The Honeymooners , with the father Peter (Alan Held) most resembling  a somewhat drunken Jackie Gleason, and the mother Gertrude (Rosalind Plowrights) like his  bewildered wife Alice? The dream in the f...