For theatergoers in search of to mark Valentine’s Day with reside music, love, and friendship, the DMV provides some new spins on conventional themes.
Poised to make its regional debut at Olney Theatre Middle, Sara Bareilles’s hit musical “Waitress” (Feb.13-March 30) might not appear to be a normal love story, nevertheless it’s a love story nonetheless.
“It’s about studying to like and worth your self,” says MALINDA who performs Jenna, the present’s titular server/baker with aspirations to bake prize-winning pies and alter her life. “It’s additionally about sisterhood. From the beginning, the ladies concerned within the present determined to be there for one another onstage and off, and it exhibits. For anybody with woman group love of their lives, that is an particularly good present to see.
“Jenna doesn’t get a whole lot of satisfaction out of her major partnership. Together with self-love she explores the antithesis of that — companion violence. Our director [Marcia Milgrom Dodge] took the lesson of neighborhood assist and neighborhood like to coronary heart.”
Previous to popping out as bisexual in 2022, MALINDA thought of herself extra of a “quiet queer.” Nevertheless, the inspiration derived from Irish music (“music of the oppressed”), which she’s famed for singing on TikTok, compelled her to go public.
She didn’t all the time imagine her queerness to be particular: “For me,” MALINDA says, “it was like saying my eyes are hazel. There wasn’t a lot to have fun. However then I spotted there have been lacking voices in my neighborhood. Felt like the best factor to do, and it’s been one of many nice blessings of my life.”
Six years in the past, after her Helen Hayes Award-winning flip in “As soon as,” MALINDA took a break from musical theater. She wanted time to age into dream elements, and a kind of roles was Jenna. She remembers, “Going again to theater was prominently featured on my imaginative and prescient board, so when Marcia requested me to decide to ‘Waitress,’ I fortunately agreed.”
For her, Valentine’s Day is a chance to achieve out and inform associates, household, and, after all, romantic companions, simply how a lot you like them.
And he or she provides “that’s precisely how I plan to have fun.”
D.C.’s pleasant Holly Twyford is spending Valentine’s Day working on the Folger on Capitol Hill. She’ll be on stage, her spouse will probably be within the viewers, and relying on the size of this system, they’ll exit to dinner afterward.
For 4 performances, the multi-Helen Hayes award-winning actor is serving as narrator for “The Love Birds” (Feb. 14-16), a brand new Folger Consort work that blends medieval music with a world-premiere composition by acclaimed composer Juri Web optimization and readings from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “A Parlement of Foules” by Twyford.
Standing behind a podium, she’ll learn Chaucer’s phrases (translated from Center English and backed by projected slides within the unique language), alternating with music performed on previous and new devices.
“The brand new music is form of dissonant with the sounds of birdcalls and nature sounds, portray an image of what’s happening in Chaucer’s poem that’s stunning and humorous. Chaucer describes the male eagles pleading for the hand of the feminine eagle. Chaucer appears virtually unwittingly feminist when he has the feminine eagle ask her eagle suitors to provide her a 12 months to consider it.”
GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights presents “Fuenteovejuna” (by March 2), a well timed manufacturing staged by out director José Luis Arelleno. Penned in 1613, this work from the Spanish Golden Age ranks amongst playwright Lope de Vega’s most carried out performs.
It’s about tyranny and love, Arellano explains. Inside Lope de Vega’s well timed story of brutish energy lies an intense love story. In actual fact, on the high of the present, 4 characters, two males and two females play a sport. What’s love? One of many gamers asserts that love doesn’t exist, whereas the others disagree. It’s an enthralling technique to kick off the play.
The celebrated director isn’t one to telegraph messages, preferring audiences suppose for themselves. That mentioned, he does, after all, make sturdy directorial selections: “If I’ve to decide on between love or warfare, it’s extra vital to speak about love. For me, it’s a revolution.”
And apropos of a Valentine’s Day date, GALA’s manufacturing of “Fuenteovejuna” (carried out in Spanish with English surtitles) is imbued with reside music and verse, an vital a part of any romantic expertise, provides David Peralto, the manufacturing’s poetry and verse marketing consultant in addition to Arellano’s longtime companion.
The busy Spain-based couple will have fun Valentine’s Day in Seville and couldn’t be happier. Arellano describes Seville as essentially the most romantic metropolis on this planet.
