Theater plays in DC

I usually watch 1-2 plays a week, but only one music last Thursday: 1st lady of song: Ella Fitzgerald. I invited two friends to go with me and we ate at a Thai restaurant in old town Alexandria. I tried a new dish: green noodle for the drunk. We enjoyed Ella's most famous songs performed by Ms. Freda Payne and a live band on the stage.

"Ella Fitzgerald, her cousin and traveling companion Georgiana, and her manager and jazz impresario Norman Granz tell her story. From a homeless street dancer to winning amateur night at the Apollo Theatre at the age of 15, from headlining with Chick Webb and his Orchestra at the Savoy Ballroom to performing Live at the Cote D'Azur, from discovering she could "scat" to mastering a new art form called "bebop," the fascinating journey of this legendary artist." http://www.metrostage.org/ella%2c-first-lady-of-song.html#.UuP4dYUo7IU
 

 

One week ago, I invited another friend to see a wild physical comedy, the crafty Scapin, servant to the household of Geronte, who promises to help in affairs of his neighbor’s son, Octave, then to aid in those of his own charge, Leander (Geronte’s son). Both young men have fallen in love with unlikely, and penniless beauties (Hyacinth and Zerbinette), and both need money to help solve their dilemmas. http://www.constellationtheatre.org/scapin.html

Two weeks before, I watched two plays Twelfth Night  and Bang the Drum Slowly in the same week with two different friends. Twelfth Night has no dialogue yet the story became clear with the clear stage design and rich body language. I really like this play.  As to Bang the Drum Slowly, I felt very sorry that my friend barely watched it because he was just informed that his properties in Hagerstown, MD were under severe water damages from burst pipes.

"Set in the roaring 20s, Twelfth Night tells the tale of fraternal twins, Viola and Sebastian, separated in a strange new land. Having survived a shipwreck and believing her brother Sebastian has been lost, Viola falls hopelessly in love with Duke Orsino and disguises herself as a man to enter his services. Synetic’s take on the Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night will be a confluence of comedy and tragedy; a social commentary that brings laughter to sobering truth. Synetic co-founders Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili will direct and star in this production, respectively." http://www.synetictheater.org/event_pages/twelfth-night

"Fans of baseball fiction know that Mark Harris’s “Blue Sox” series is the best of the breed, with Bang the Drum Slowly the high point of that complex and realistic saga of star lefty pitcher Henry Wiggin. The moving and often funny story of how the terminal illness of one of Wiggin’s teammates affects a major league baseball team was first adapted into a live TV drama starring a very young Paul Newman in 1956; the film version was Robert DeNiro’s first major movie role. " http://www.americancentury.org/show_drum.php