Upcoming Free Showcase

(Artwork by Jim Colwell)

Join
Alliance for New Music-Theatre
in a FREE showcase of its new work

A Woman Changed Into a Fox
a chamber opera

Conceived by Susan Galbraith
Based on a novella by David Garnet
Music by Robert B. Johnson
Libretto by Susan Galbraith
with Musical Direction by George Fulginiti-Shakar

Part detective story part magical fairy tale,
the showcase features
Phil Bender, John Boulanger, Chris Flint,
Cindy Hutchins, Laura Lewis and Kara Morgan

Wednesday, May 18 at 7:30pm
Tuesday, May 24 at 7:30pm
at
MetroStage
1201 North Royal Street
Alexandria, VA 22314

Seating is limited
To reserve a space, call 703-548-9044

Or go online to http://www.newmusictheatre.org/

Jahi Kearse, from MetroStage to Broadway debut in Baby It’s You!

Jahi Kearse is a hoofer, a singer, a musician, a powerful actor, and a songwriter who critics and DC area theatregoers have enthusiastically embraced his performances in MetroStage’s Cool Papa’s Party, Round House Theatre’s Pippin, and The Studio Theatre’s Slam!, Top Dog/Underdog, and Passing Strange.

On April 27th, Jahi will be making his Broadway debut in the new musical Baby It’s You! In Joel Markowitz's interview at DCTheatreScene.com, he tells us how Cool Papa’s Party helped to land him on Broadway.

CLICK HERE to read the full interview >

Opening Night Reception Photos

(Photos by Jeanne Theismann)

Our Heroes Meet Again

By Jane Horwitz
April 19, 2011

“Torture — it’s agony,” jests director John Vreeke when asked what it’s like to reunite with veteran actors Ralph Cosham, John Dow and Michael Tolaydo. In spring 2009, he directed them at MetroStage in a well-received production of “Heroes.” The play by French dramatist Gerald Sibleyras, translated and adapted by Tom Stoppard, featured the actors as cranky World War I veterans finding friendship in an old soldiers’ home.

Now he’s directing them in another Stoppard play, an early-career farce, “The Real Inspector Hound,” running Wednesday night through May 29 at MetroStage. Turning to the three actors during a rehearsal break, the director asks, “How many years between the three of you — experience — do you have? Three hundred and fifty years?” He adds dryly, “It’s all about keeping the insults going.”

Vreeke had suggested the play to Producing Artistic Director Carolyn Griffin as a vehicle for bringing the three actors back together, albeit this time within a larger cast that includes well-known Washington actors Catherine Flye, Kimberly Gilbert and Emily Townley.

Stoppard’s play and its play-within-a-play spoofs stage whodunits like Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” as well as pretentious theater critics. It opens with a corpse on the floor in the drawing room of Muldoon Manor — a body no one notices for half the play.

Cosham and Tolaydo play theater critics Moon and Birdboot, who sit at the far end of the stage, facing the murder mystery that’s unfolding before them and also facing the audience. They comment on the performance and digress extensively into Birdboot’s philandering ways and Moon’s inferiority complex about being a second-string critic at his paper. Playing someone with an inferiority complex “requires a great deal of acting on my part,” Cosham observes.

Dow plays Magnus, who, he explains, is “a heavily disguised cripple that we later realize is . . .” well, that would be telling. Suffice it to say that Magnus is “a guy in disguise, in disguise, in disguise . . . so I don’t know what I’m doing,” the actor concludes.

For Tolaydo, playing the more self-confident, if equally clueless, critic Birdboot is not an act of revenge. “I don’t think of critics as the enemy, but I don’t read them, if I can help it, until after.” And not even then, if he can avoid it, he says.

Notes from the Producer

Eclectic theatre in an intimate theatre space is our "mantra" here at MetroStage. We love our small musicals, our quirky little plays, our parodies of Broadway composers and, of course, Tom Stoppard, the playwright who has been called the "master of the English language." Several years ago we produced a little gem of a play called "Heroes." Although only translated by Stoppard from the French, it had Stoppard’s signature style and language. The three old soldiers played by Ralph Cosham, Michael Tolaydo and John Dow, captured the hearts and imagination of our audience, as well as the Helen Hayes judges who attended. Our brilliant little ensemble of three received the Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Ensemble in a Resident Production, in a field of over 180 eligible professional productions in the Washington, D.C., metro area, and the award is proudly on display on our box office counter.

This spring our "heroes" have returned to MetroStage for another Tom Stoppard play — this time with five supporting actors (if you include the corpse) to help solve this classic English manor murder mystery. Over 40 years ago Stoppard wrote "The Real inspector Hound," which is a send up of a murder mystery best exemplified by Agatha Christie’s long running play "The Mousetrap," but also skewers the classic overbearing theatre critic so it is really grand fun on many levels. Since we have all been skewered at one time or another by theatre critics, it is particular fun for theatre producers and playwrights to turn the tables on the critics on occasion.

John Vreeke, a favorite MetroStage director, is back to direct another Stoppard with a remarkable cast of characters played by some of Washington’s favorite actors. Every English mystery has to have a Manor, in this case Muldoon Manor, and, of course, it is "secluded" and surrounded by "desolate marshes." In fact, it is said that there are "no roads leading from the manor, though there are ways of getting to it, weather permitting." Theatre critics Moon and Birdboot review this "play within a play" and unwittingly become involved. The audience will get to know the Lady of the Manor, Lady Cynthia Muldoon, and her younger friend, Felicity Cunningham, Major Magnus Muldoon, " the crippled half-brother of her ladyship’s husband who had turned up out of the blue from Canada just the other day," a mysterious stranger Simon Gascoyne, an Inspector Hound who arrives in swamp boots but is he Real (?), and the ubiquitous housekeeper, Mrs. Drudge. And last but not least a Corpse because there is a mystery to be solved. It is quite a collection of characters and a wonderful cast. MetroStage will be hosting this house party through May, and you won’t want to miss it because how else will you find out the true identity of the Corpse!

- Carolyn Griffin