For theatergoers looking for to mark Valentine’s Day with stay music, love, and friendship, the DMV presents some new spins on conventional themes.
Poised to make its regional debut at Olney Theatre Heart, Sara Bareilles’s hit musical “Waitress” (Feb.13-March 30) might not seem to be a standard love story, however 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 lady group love of their lives, that is an particularly good present to see.
“Jenna doesn’t get plenty of satisfaction out of her major partnership. Together with self-love she explores the antithesis of that — accomplice violence. Our director [Marcia Milgrom Dodge] took the lesson of group assist and group like to coronary heart.”
Previous to popping out as bisexual in 2022, MALINDA thought of herself extra of a “quiet queer.” Nonetheless, 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 consider her queerness to be particular: “For me,” MALINDA says, “it was like saying my eyes are hazel. There wasn’t a lot to rejoice. However then I spotted there have been lacking voices in my group. Felt like the suitable 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 succeed in 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 rejoice.”
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 might 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 authentic 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 occurring in Chaucer’s poem that’s lovely 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 offer 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 prime 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 option to kick off the play.
The celebrated director isn’t one to telegraph messages, preferring audiences assume for themselves. That stated, he does, after all, make sturdy directorial selections: “If I’ve to decide on between love or conflict, it’s extra necessary 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 stay music and verse, an necessary a part of any romantic expertise, provides David Peralto, the manufacturing’s poetry and verse advisor in addition to Arellano’s longtime accomplice.
The busy Spain-based couple will rejoice Valentine’s Day in Seville and couldn’t be happier. Arellano describes Seville as probably the most romantic metropolis on the planet.
