Results tagged “woollymammoth”

When it comes to Woolly Mammoth's season-opening production of , sometimes you just have to run with it. Literally.

Woolly Mammoth shouldn’t have trouble selling tickets to its current show, ; the reputation of Chicago’s Second City comedy group will do most of the work. The legendary improv school fostered the careers of entertainers like Stephen Colbert and Dan Castellaneta (the voice of Homer Simpson), and regularly supplies members for the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” from Tina Fey to Bill Murray. Given their impressive past, the question is not whether their new show, exclusive to Woolly, is funny, but rather, “how funny is it?”

Daisey is due lots of credit for his willingness to bite the hand that feeds him, if only just. He calls himself a "carrion bird of the American theater," aware that his popular monologues -- 2001's 21 Dog Years, about his spell as an Amazon.com clock-puncher; and last summer's Fringe Fest hit, If You See Something, Say Something, skewering our post-9/11 tendency to see terrorists in our cereal, among them -- appeal to theaters chiefly because they cost peanuts. He knows that if he's on the stage, then a play is not. He gets some comic mileage early on by reeling off the usual suspects in the murder of American stagecraft: Reagan, the Disney megalith, iPods, and (ahem) critics. But when he comes round to prosecuting his case, his target turns out to be the theater companies themselves, particularly the ones mortgaging their futures to ornate new buildings when they literally can't give tickets away to people younger than 30 to replenish an audience that's aging and dying off. "You only play to the people in the house, and there are less of them every year," Daisey observes ominously.

, Woolly Mammoth's crazy new comedy, you still have no idea who that wacky woman in the headset is who's literally pulling the strings of the players below, you're probably at the wrong show. But if as an audience member, you kind of like to run with absurdity, you're in for a fun (and eventful) 90 minutes.

Jason Grote is certainly charming his way through the Washington theater scene.

At the intersection of today's American realities and mindboggling fictional dystopia sits Mike Daisey, at a table with a glass of water and a metal briefcase (yes, the one filled with irony). His monologue performance for the Fringe Festival at Woolly Mammoth Theatre is a stellar showcase of storytelling skills, bringing the audience along a trip through the desert to Trinity, the site of the first nuclear bomb test in Los Alamos, with a narrative woven around the history and build-up of today's massive "homeland security" system.

at Woolly Mammoth will largely be dictated by your tolerance of puns.

deserves total props for taking a familiar idea and making an entirely engaging one-woman show about it.

“The thing about an urban legend is that it never happened to the person tellin’ it. It always happened to someone else.”

. Seriously, there's plenty to like in January, from gutsy works to brand-new musicals.

If that makes any sense to you, you’re probably the target of Charles Ross’s uproarious , now making a return engagement in D.C. at Woolly Mammoth Theater. The show's exactly what it sounds like -- Ross acts out just about every scene of the three original films with gusto, even humming the movements of the soundtrack -- and he only needs 60 minutes to pull it off.

>> Woolly Mammoth's popular One Man Star Wars Trilogy is back, written and performed by Charles Ross. Tickets are $28 for the 8 p.m. show.

Though modernizing the Odyssey is hardly new territory, Woolly Mammoth’s production of Melissa James Gibson’s Current Nobody still manages to feel fresh.

>> Jazz fans won't want to miss guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel at Blues Alley tonight, feauturing saxophonist Mark Turner, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Ben Street and drummer Rodney Green. Sets are at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Tickets available here. $25 + $10 food/drink minimum. >> Tickets are still available for Woolly Mammoth's production of The Unmentionables, about which our critic said that it "points Fat Albert’s giant index finger at the audience in a...

The Unmentionables, Woolly Mammoth’s incendiary season-opener, boasts one of the strongest companies to tread a District stage this year. Their comic timing is both tight and loose, like a well-rehearsed but highly instinctive group of musicians. But the real star is Bruce Norris’s play itself, a screwball satire about imperialism, do-gooderism and hypocrisy. Set in equatorial West Africa, this jeremiad finds as much fault with supposedly altruistic relief workers who come to ease their...

, part of the Capital Fringe Festival. And we're better for it - after all, who doesn't want to hear about the adventures of a spitfire, 16th century female pirate?

Well, there’s Rick Foucheaux in a chair playing a dead guy again. And look — Sarah Marshall is acting crazy as only she can. And come to think of it, this is another Sarah Ruhl play that concerns itself with the afterlife. Is there anything original happening here?

FRIDAY:

>> Artists Virgil Marti and Pae White, whose new conceptual piece has recently been installed in the lobby of the Hirshhorn, will give a Meet the Artists talk in the museum's Ring Auditorium. [7th St. and Independence Ave. SW, Free, 7 p.m.]

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Well, they don’t call it Shakespeare in Washington for nothing. This month brings quite the selection of Bard-tastic choices. We’ve got Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare Theater (April 3), The As-You-Like-It-inspired She Stoops to Comedy at Woolly Mammoth (April 1), and The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Coriolanus at the Kennedy Center (April 13). Plus, Edward III just opened this week at Washington Shakespeare Company, and even Lord John Marbury's in DC this weekend, doing the...

Try to think of something you've done every day for the past year. What comes to mind? Obsessively checking email? Brushing your teeth? Buying a no-fat latte at Starbucks?

, a play with characters who seem to be a conveniently thrown-together group of wackos rather than anything resembling a realistically dysfunctional family. We’re talking a dominatrix, a possibly-retarded sister, an obsessive-compulsive cleaning lady, and naturally, the Elvis, to name a few. Luckily, most of the actors assembled here by Woolly Mammoth Theater are up to the task of creating real people out of the caricatures they’ve been given.

So if October's the month for spooky productions and December is the time to get in the holiday spirit, what does November mean for D.C. Theater? Looks like this month, it means a diverse catalogue of everything from Chinese Elvises to Katie Couric (ok, maybe some theaters are apparently still thinking "scary"). Actors' Theater of Washington has the camp-tastic Fatal Attraction: A Greek Tragedy, which will serve as a late-night follow-up to its current production,...

FRIDAY: >> It's the DAM! Festival, son. We've already written a blue streak about it, so check out our recent music archives for some great interviews and MP3s from participating artists, and weigh your options between The Red and the Black, the Rock and Roll Hotel, or Velvet Lounge, full schedule with too many bands to list here. Of course, the non-DAM! show of the night is clearly Baltimore's Spank Rock, who'll be bringing their...

FRIDAY: >> In "sucks but it's true" news, the H Street NE scene, while awesomely fun, can still be a dangerous part of town. Argonaut bartender Luis "Quike" Morales was reminded of that fact the hard way late last month, when he was shot in the head while walking home from work. Amazingly, Quike survived, but his mounting medical bills are more than any service industry salary could handle. So head on down to the...

, the audience found just about every moment of the work uproariously funny. Was it because the lines were genuinely clever? Was it because they agreed so wholeheartedly with the author's liberal stance? Was it a much-needed release after enduring years upon years of injustice from the Bush administration? It's hard to say, but it begs the question whether the play would receive the same reaction from a demographically different crowd.

, natch.

FRIDAY:

Just as it's back-to-school time for area students, it's back-to-the-boards time for the area's theatre community. September brings with it a host of new productions to get you through the lingering heat.