It may be the opinion of some that I was born to speak all mirth and no matter, but one doth not know how much an ill word can empoison liking. Let’s hope that’s enough mangled lines from the Bard’s source material to bait the proverbial bear and get this review of The Rude Mechanicals’ Much Ado About Nothing underway. Directed by Shirely Long, this Shakespearean comedy about— well, mostly a fuss made over nothing,
If you expect to see a pipe smoking, violin playing, deerstalker wearing detective Sherlock Holmes solving crimes you’ve come to the wrong show. This show is not about Holmes at all, it’s about his companion Dr. John Watson (and he does wear a deerstalker, fans of the iconic hat may rejoice!). Well, the play really isn’t about Dr. John Watson either. Actually it’s really very complicated and complex. The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence comes from the mind of award-winning playwright Madeline George and it won the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Playwriting Award.
A collaborative adaptation of As You Like It by William Shakespeare; this is the marketing tag for The Rude Mechanical’s latest production— Arden Now— which debuted earlier this summer at the 2017 Capital Fringe Festival. Now playing at the Greenbelt Arts Center for a two-weekend engagement, the doors have been opened to those unwilling or unable to attend the chaotic frenzy that is CapFringe, and the stage is a veritable carnival of concepts that don’t quite come together as Director Melissa Schick intends in her director’s note.
Live your life. We never know when it will stop. A fatal disease, a catastrophic accident, none of us know when life will stop. What if you had resigned your fate to life ending? What if you had accepted the fact that you were terminal when suddenly an organ became available to save your life? Would you want to know where it came from? Would you want to know whose heart was beating inside your chest?
Misery. Grief. Despair. These are the ailments with which English housewife Charlotte Wilson finds herself plagued in the suffocating confines of dreary, rainy London. She needs a break. She needs to bring purpose into her life, which she feels like she is fast losing. One day, as she is contemplating this, she reads an advertisement in the paper, and Charlotte Wilton finds herself swept up in the enchantment of an up-for-rent village on the coast of Italy,
When the set has five separate doors— and a pun for a title— a farce is surely in the offing. A cast of nine and five doors means many opportunities for getting away, for being clueless, and… well, a few other things you can do with doors. These five doors belong to a luxurious suite at the Palm Beach Royale Hotel, where not one but two top-grade Hollywood divas have come to raise money for the USO.