It’s festival summer time in DC. Hip Hop Theater Festival starts today. It’s hot-hot-hot.
The Capital Fringe Festival opens Thursday, July 8 — “where everyone’s story has value!”
Screen on the Green is back! I’ve heard rumblings that this free outdoor film festival on the National Mall (between the Lincoln Memorial and US Capitol) [...]
“My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort [...]
The Washington Post’s Peeps Show/Contest has become one of my favorite spring traditions. And this year is no exception in terms of creativity and talent. I never thought Peeps were food in the first place. Always left them in my Easter basket. My favorites were the chocolate anything and the colored eggs. [...]
All my life, I lived or was schooled by the adages “The show must go on.” “One monkey don’t stop no show.”
What happened with Terrence McNally’s “Lips Together, Teeth Apart” at Roundabout Theater in NYC?? - Actress Megan Mullally quits before the April 9 preview performances and the show’s cancelled. Help me Ethel [...]
This is the last week of the Man Ray, African Art and the Modernist Lens exhibit at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. If you know DC, you know it’s tough for a native like me to shell out $12 to see an art exhibit with all the free Smithsonians in town. But [...]
SYMPOSIUM: Cuba in the World: Literature, Politics, Performance
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of meeting Ariel Fernandez at the Future of Music Policy Summit. Ariel’s working on a new documentary “Hip-Hop in Cuba: a Revolution Within the Revolution.” He sent me an email to let me know that he’s in [...]
Vera Katz called me a week ago to give me the heads up on a reading she’s directing of a new work by Caleen Sinette Jennings. My ears immediately perked up. Caleen is a very talented playwright. I’ve shared the one-act festival stage with her at Source Theatre here in DC. [...]
I remember my vice principle in high school patroling the halls snapping the order to “Get to Class!” Well that’s where school stops and life-learning starts.
Last night I treated myself (i.e., stepped away from the laptop to engage in life), to a workshop reading of Anu Yadav’s Classlines, a series of monologues or stories [...]
DC has a weird relationship with its artists. It balances on amusement and indifference. You’re considered not-good-enough for the big time if you stay; forgotten as home town talent if you leave. Even our own Mayor Fenty was getting kudos for scoring Chicago’s Kanye West during the inaugural festivities; not for hometown [...]
It’s always interesting to see which arts medium the chairs of the National Endowment for the Arts will come from. This year it’s the theater. The announcement was made today that Broadway producer Rocco Landesman was nominated for the chair of the NEA following poet and literary critic/scholar Dana Gioia who resigned in [...]
