Articles Tagged With: Sam David

B. Thomas Rinaldi (left) as Rev. Duke and Brad Harris Purtill (right) as Tom Prior in Outward Bound at Spotlighters Theatre. 📸 Matthew Christopher

Outward Bound at Spotlighters Theatre

“…to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave…”

Christmas starts in October for everyone else, so why not use a lesser-recognized Dickens’ quote to welcome in the latest show of Season 61 at Spotlighters? (And if you need more Dickens in your life, beyond this hook-quote, be sure to book your tickets for the cherished annual performance of Phil Gallagher’s one-man A Christmas Carol coming this December) But this particular quote feels apropos for Outward Bound,

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The Game’s Afoot at Cockpit In Court

Everyone wants publicity, daaahlings. Even the bad kind is the good kind, because any kind beats no kind, right? Lucky for Thomas “Toby” Hessenauer and the company of Ken Ludwig’s The Game’s Afoot it’s the good kind. Mostly. I’m no Daria Chase, daaahlings, but for God’s sake, I am a theatre critic. Launching the ‘upstairs’ half of the upstairs-downstairs-summertime-palooza that we all know to be Cockpit in Court, this zany little Baskerville-wannabe is two parts mystery,

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Hellbent at Laurel Mill Playhouse

Hellbent at Laurel Mill Playhouse

Nine. The number of positions to be fielded in baseball. Nine. The ball that kept hitting the poor mouse as we learned multiplication from School House Rock. Nine. The levels of Dante’s hell. Nine. The number of actors needed for Jeff Dunne’s Hellbent at Laurel Mill Playhouse.

The Director, and Playwright of Hellbent has really out Dunne himself. Having read several of Dunne’s plays through the Baltimore Playwrights Festival,

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Scharf’s Shorts at Spotlighters Theatre

Friday night, October 22, 2021, was a very big night for a small but important theatre, one of a select few that are the very soul of Baltimore theatre history. After nineteen months of darkness thrust upon them due to Covid-19 lockdowns and mandates, The Audrey Herman Spotlighters Theatre, that diminutive little workhorse in the step down basement on St. Paul Street, opened again with a light fanfare and a comfortable crowd of faithful patrons to kick off their 59th Season.

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Atypical Perspectives at West Arundel Creative Arts

Though at first it may seem clownish, see the world more upside-downish! Turn it on it’s head and pirouette it! Anything can happen if you let it…and you’re letting it happen at the West Arundel Creative Arts Center when you go to see Atypical Perspectives: An Evening of One-Act Plays written by Jeff Dunne. While the sole connective thread of the six one-act plays appears to be only that they share the same author,

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Jacie (Caity Brown) prepares to throw a pie at Carla Pepperbloom (Diane Sams)

Review: Comic Potential at McLean Community Players

It’s a rare treat for a reviewer to be able to praise a performance as “robotic”. Caity Brown magnificently straddles the line between android and human in McLean Community Players production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Comic Potential.

Brown plays Jacie, a young female robot in a world where actors have been replaced by “actoid” acting units. This charmingly absurd proposition sets up a delicate challenge for Brown, who must be convincing simultaneously as a machine but also as somebody who has lived a thousand lives of intense human emotion —

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Review: Henry IV Parts I & II at The Rude Mechanicals

Before Luke Skywalker becomes a man, he started out hanging out with an old man and a pack of ne’r do wells in a crap bar while his dad and more useful sibling were out there ruling the universe. George Lucas snagged a page from Shakespeare and made it his own into the form we know and love today.  The Rude Mechanicals have taken this tumultuous two-part history of Henry IV about life,

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Review: All’s Well That Ends Well at The Rude Mechanicals

Girl wants boy. Boy wants different girl. Girl tricks boy into wanting her. And they live happily ever after. Other stuff happens. There’s a fool involved somehow. And a king. And a fistula. That the girl magically cures the king of with her magical powers, or her herbs and whatnot. And then they live happily ever after. Also some love letters and a ring. Maybe some secretive identities, a ten-o’clock kidnapping, and a horse?

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Review: The Life and Death of King John at The Rude Mechanicals

Ne’er so bethump’d with words has this critic found herself when staring down an amalgamation of a Shakespearean remount dipped in Pythonian humor and sprayed liberally with truncation across the Greenbelt Arts Center’s intimate black box stage, than she has in this very moment in attempting to report upon The Life and Death of King John as presented by The Rude Mechanicals. A history most boring upended ass over tea-kettle by Director Alan Duda,

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Review: Julius Caesar at The Rude Mechanicals

Friends! Romans! Washingtonians! The time has come to take a stand against the inconstant shifting nature of theatre in Washington DC! Hail The Rude Mechanicals and their rebellious production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Directed by company founder Jaki Demarest, this scandalous production takes the great Roman Empire to 1920’s soviet occupied Russia. Stalin, proletariat, rebellion; all encompassed in Demarest’s revolutionary vision of one of the Bard’s milder tragedies.

With honor in one eye and death in the other,

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Review: Macbeth- The Instruments of Darkness at The Rude Mechanicals

Light and darkness make fools both of the eyes. But it is oft better to live in the bliss of darkness than in the harsh intelligence of the light for once a thing is known and learned it can never be unknown. The Rude Mechanicals illustrate this concept with exception as their bring their 2014 Capital Fringe Festival production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: The Instruments of Darkness to the Greenbelt Arts Center for a limited five show engagement.

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The Vagina Monologues at Greenbelt Arts Center

What would your vagina say if it could talk? Mine would say that you need to go see the Rude Mechanicals and their production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues at the Greenbelt Art Center. Co-Directed by Lauren Beward and Jaki Demarest, this particular production of the iconic feminist piece is defying the standards of which the original was formed with and setting the benchmark extremely high for all future productions.

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