House of Gold @ Woolly Mammoth

Sam and I ushered this one together. It is a retelling of the Jon Benet Ramsay story with some added characters (I think) and a surreal setting. Many of the major characters are all given ghoulish motives and the play feels like the shadowed projections of those motives onto a big screen. Sometimes these stories overlap and conflict and do not make a lot of sense from a plot standpoint, but the overall affect is interesting in its successful portrait of the entire situation as being basically a clusterfuck. And if nothing else, it portrays a murky line between how messed up a world a writer can create compared to how messed up the world is we inhabit.

The real standout for me was the young bullied kid, Jon Benet befriends (not sure if he is a character in the real life drama). This show benefits a bit from some reflection as my impression while watching it was not especially favorable. But then I think it may be trying to communicate an ugly tale. I feel like I just ate a tray of eggplant. I suppose its good for me but only in an academic sort of way.

Ameriville @ Round House

This was a very innovative production, a fusion of cadence, poetry, drama and percussion. Four performers mostly alternating monologues breath life into stories of New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina hit, and now years later. The telling is an indictment of our nonchalance towards the victims there, and the story uses Katrina as a mechanism to point a spotlight at many of the ills of American society, and especially those related to it's class divide.

I think this piece was successful when it talked about Katrina directly. At times though, the shear volume of social ills it attempted to spotlight becomes overwhelming and numbing. Perhaps more focus on a smaller set of issues would have been more poignant.

From an artistic standpoint, this was very well done. The performers were all excellent, and this innovative drama provides a nice break from the formulas I am more accustomed to seeing.

October Restaurants

One of my favorite meta discoveries of how to explore the city this year are the various daily coupon emails I receive. They basically offer half off certificates to a different restaurant every day. I have email subscriptions to about six of them, so there is a pretty good chance I will see one for a place near by or someplace we have heard we need to try at least once a week. I'll summarize these by the month.

Oct 1 - Lupe Cantina - Not Bad. Sam had a salsa and eggs dish and I did the Chicken Mole. Good Marguritas and a good happy hour.
Oct 17 - Kinkeads - This place is amazing. Might be my favorite restaurant. Awesome and eclectic seafood dishes. Sam had a scallop dish with gnocchi and I had some seared tuna with guac
Oct 22 - The Fourth Estate - Pleasantly Surprised. Not much for atmosphere but the food was excellent if a bit on the rich and buttery side. I had scallops and Sam had rock fish.
Oct 24 - Floriana - Neighborhood Gem. Great ambiance in an old townhome. Food was decadent. Sam won with the carrot ginger soup.
Oct 29 - Pizzeria Paradiso - A regular, but with guests in town, a standby
Oct 31 - Penang - I did not win with my order by everyone else's entrees were pretty good.

Rally to Restore Fear/Sanity

I had been looking forward to attending this all month and went with a small group just in time to get situated as it got started. The crowd was immense, overwhelming. While the inauguration had more people, it was also much more spread out. This was more like being in a Rock concert. Sometimes we just had to let the crowd direct our movement. The signs were everywhere and they were hysterical. I felt I did my part by being a number here. I think the rally did a lot to undermine the pompous gravity of the Beck rally.

Anyway, we could only handle it for a little while. After about a half hour, we got some food truck food by the National Gallery and watched the crowd while we ate. Then we headed to a nearby bar to watch and listen to the rally on a big screen. We just beat the crowds as we scored a table before everyone else caught on to our idea.

Mary Stuart @ Artisphere

Artisphere is a new Venue that just opened in Rosslyn to house a community art exhibition space and a couple of Arlington based theatre companies. One of those companies is the Washington Shakespeare Company which I had heard about only in a guide book as having phenomenal to see Shakespeare on the cheap. And that part is definately true. All their saturday matinees are Pay-What-You-Can, but you can order the tix on line instead of having to wait in line for them. I suppose I had mentally set the bar pretty low as I had already seen productions at two other Shakespeare theatres in town (STC and Folgers) so I figured WSC would be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I was very wrong on that last point. This was an excellent production, well worth a full priced ticket (though I think I will stick to the cheaper ones given the number of shows I attend). The set was very spare and did some interesting things with chairs to make it quite a bit more than minimal. The actors were mostly phenomenal, and the pair of female leads were nothing short of outstanding.

I was not familiar with this story but it was very well told and interesting as a way to convey the history of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Queen Elizabeth, the virgin queen. It realistically explains the politics, legal drama, and power implications of all the maneuvering being done by the principals. Very well done.

Hair @ Kennedy Center

I have been hearing about this show for a couple of years as my mom reminisced about seeing it. So I entered with pretty high hopes about it capturing an era that I feel like I know something about, albeit secondhand. My impression after seeing it is that it left me thinking that era was... rather silly. Sort of in an American Monty Python sort of way. Don't get me wrong, the opening and closing numbers of Aquarius and Let the Sun Shine in were phenomenal. And I think the plot, when there was one, had potential. But in between all that, were some musical numbers that had no resonance for me and some scenes that made very little sense.

So I guess I wish there were more recognizable songs, and a little bit more tension building towards the climax. Otherwise, I feel a bit let down.

Songs of the Dragon Flying To Heaven @ Studio

This play was terrible. I am tempted to leave it at that but bad manifests itself in different ways so let me elaborate. The Importance of Being Ernest was bad because the actors were not very good. The director's choice to have opposite gender actors play all the characters made it far worse mainly because the actors were not able to pull it off. I suppose it is possible that if they were better, this choice wold not have been so bad. In Songs, I think the root problem is the script. The actors were mostly superb, in that they all seemed like real people in a shockingly odd situation. The play made me bored, confused, and yes uncomfortable throughout. Bored, as I was looking at my watch waiting for it to end, and was not not engaged enough with anything going on to take an interest. Confused because of the absence of any recognizable plot, and the placement of jarring characters and themes together. Uncomfortable because of the excessive length of certain gimmicks, and my empathy for everyone else in the theatre having to sit through it. I think I can say with certainty that the points made about being a minority in white America were not the source of my discomfort. In fact, I think if the playwright built more upon this theme it would have been a better piece. Reviews I have read give it far more stature than I.