The Colored Museum: Ayanna Bria Bakari, Kelli Blackwell, William Oliver Watkins, Iris Beaumier – Photo: Teresa Castracane
Studio Theatre has resplendently re-opened The Colored Museum, George C. Wolfe’s biting survey of Black American history, myth, humor, and representation in art and culture.
The entrance and stage of Studio’s Victor Shargai Theatre comprise the galleries, displaying artifacts on the play’s themes, created by students from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts.
Works hung inside the theater, and even the seating, envelope the audience within Psalmayene 24’s environmental production, shrewdly designed by Natsu Onoda Power.
The prime exhibits on view at the Colored Museum are eleven brilliantly-written sketches encompassing centuries of Black lives, since African ancestors arrived in America as cargo, up to the modern age of so-called liberation. On ages of perceptions and misconceptions, Wolfe’s stories speak truth with lacerating wit, and subvert stereotypes with deceptive ease.
It takes a quick company to keep up, and Psalmayene — who’s been impressively busy and beautifully productive across four different shows this past season — has assembled an ensemble that’s up to the task, and always in on the joke.
Not everyone in the house will be sure when to laugh as the exhibits dip fearlessly into discomforting waters. “Fasten your shackles,” warns flight attendant Miss Pat (Ayanna Bria Bakari), in preparation for the first sketch, our hazardous voyage across the Middle Passage aboard the Celebrity Slave Ship.
“And please ignore the drums,” she adds. But the drumbeat travels the Middle Passage with us, of course, carries us through every chapter, every exhibit — literally, in the form of percussionist Jabari Exum, a masterful presence onstage.
Presence only begins to describe the myriad qualities Kelli Blackwell brings to multiple roles throughout, including in the incendiary TV spoof “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel.” Grinning wide, Aunt Ethel stirs up a saucy recipe for her viewers, with “rage” and “attitude” among the spicy ingredients. What could she be cookin’ up?
The taste surely will be bittersweet, as is most of the comedy, riding somewhere between silly and seething, and calibrated to perfection by Blackwell, Bakari, Iris Beaumier, and William Oliver Watkins in “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” the evening’s best of a murderer’s row of great sketches.
An absolutely hysterical parody of all the sorts of stereotypical stage drama Black theater talent have felt confined to, “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play” finds this ensemble firing at their sharpest.
And, juxtaposed with solid solo sketches like Matthew Elijah Webb’s powerful turn in “The Gospel According to Miss Roj,” and duos like Webb and Watkins doing “Symbiosis,” the Mama-on-the-Couch sketch highlights how fluidly Psalmayene moves the revue through its many transitions, setups, genres, and emotions.
The ensemble ends the Mama-on-the-Couch sketch belting gospel, hitting subtle notes of humor, courtesy of composer Kysia Bostic. The notes could have been less subtle, technically, with better amplification for the vocalists.
Although, judging subtlety as it pertains to satire will probably depend on how one empathizes with the pain and rage and attitude that underscore all the humor.
The Colored Museum: Iris Beaumier, Kelli Blackwell, and Ayanna Bria Bakari – Photo: Teresa Castracane
In the ridiculous but oh-so-profound sketch “The Hairpiece,” a single lady (Blackwell) is confronted by her two outspoken wigs — one an Afro (Beaumier), the other long, straight, and flowing (Bakari) — over not just which hair to wear, but what kind of Black woman she must be.
In “Symbiosis,” Watkins portrays a man who’d trash any and every connection to his Blackness — his records, his Afro pick, his first pair of Converse sneakers — in order to get ahead.
Does making progress — advancing the race, as they used to say — require killing off past selves, abandoning who you were for what you aim to be?
Or, are we all better off if we preserve even the painful reminders, keep that history safe, well-curated, and conveniently close, so someday, hopefully, we can look back from a better place and laugh?
The Colored Museum (★★★★☆) runs through Aug. 11 at Studio Theatre, 1501 14th St. NW. Tickets are $40 to $95, with discount options available. Call 202-332-3300 or visit www.StudioTheatre.org.
Life is a cabaret at the titular bolero bar in GALA Hispanic Theatre's Botiquín de Boleros de Columbia Heights. Of course, for this lively, immersive staging, directed and choreographed by Valeria Cossu, we, the audience, are the patrons at the Columbia Heights Bolero Bar.
Seated at cabaret tables onstage, at stage level, or in regular seats throughout the house, audience members may find themselves in the midst of the action for Rubén Léon's heartfelt backstage musical revue, adapted by GALA artistic director Gustavo Ott.
Formerly a mainstay of D.C.'s diverse Columbia Heights neighborhood, the fictional boîte was "one of the hottest cabarets" in town, we're told. But due to the pandemic, it has sat dormant for years, until now -- now being November 2024, just ahead of a presidential election that will prove particularly pivotal for immigrants like some of the performers who call the club home.
Brent Askari's Andy Warhol in Iran could shift some theatergoers' perspectives on a variety of complicated topics, from the junction of art and commerce, to Western interference in the affairs of modern Iran.
Making its D.C. premiere at Mosaic in a crisply-mounted production directed by Serge Seiden, the tidy two-hander takes on a world of troublesome issues without ever leaving a luxury hotel room in Tehran.
That's where the artist Andy Warhol (Alex Mills) is holed up, having been invited by the wife of the Shah, Empress Farah, to create pop-art portraits of her and the royal family.
Based on its stunning trailer -- propelled by early-Hollywood actor Taylor Holmes' ripping 1915 recording of the Rudyard Kipling poem "Boots" -- one might expect 28 Years Later to focus on a father and son's war for survival against zombie-like hordes.
Directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, creators of the 2002 series originator 28 Days Later, the film does venture with 12-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) and his rugged dad, Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), into territory crawling with rage virus-infected human predators.
Yet, that's just a piece of a richer narrative anchored by the drama of domestic dysfunction within Spike's family, which also includes his homebound, mentally ill mom, Isla (Jodie Comer).
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