The Keegan Theatre’s UNNECESSARY FARCE is the comedy we all need in these troubling times. Written by Paul Slade Smith and adroitly directed by Ray Ficca, this D.C. premiere will make you really, truly, laugh. Noah Schaefer as cop Eric opens the show with skillful physical comedy. Eric and Billie (Jenna Lawrence), two inexperienced cops, are tasked with manning
January 26, 2018: This March, the Boiler Room Series will turn up the heat for six local womXn playwrights, six local womXn directors, and a host of actors with the return of Keegan Theatre’s newly named WOMXN on Fire Festival. Building on the success and audience feedback of last year’s festival, this year the festival will feature six
Part traditional and part bedroom farce, with an appropriately absurd plot that you feel compelled to see through to the end despite the high frequency of groan-worthy jokes, Unnecessary Farce is a well received and a timely poke at all things sly and silly. The play starts as a police stakeout, trying to nap a crooked mayor
With one two-act-long scene, eight loudly slamming doors, and countless head-over-heels tumbles, Unnecessary Farce by Paul Slade Smith makes its hilarious D.C. premiere at the Keegan Theatre. Directed by Ray Ficca, this true-to-style farce tails two stumbling undercover cops in their attempts to expose an embezzling mayor and in the process crashes headlong into a mafia ring, a
The performers make the most of it. The characters who are supposed to engage our sympathy — [Noah] Schaefer as Eric and [Jenna] Lawrence as Billie — eventually do so, notwithstanding that their characters appear to have the IQs of toasters. (Lawrence does an outstanding bit where she rapidly translates the hit man’s incomprehensible Scottish
January 4, 2018: The Keegan Theatre opens 2018 with the Washington, DC premiere of Paul Slade Smith’s award-winning stage comedy, UNNECESSARY FARCE. Opening on January 23, this delightfully hilarious comedy is directed by Ray Ficca and features actors Jon Townson, Noah Shaefer, Mario Baldessari, Karen Novack, Emily Levey, Jenna Lawrence, and Christopher Herring. Ray Ficca most recently appeared
It’s not exactly clear what fluids sustained the original Ebenezer Scrooge on his late-night tour, but Dublin native Matthew J. Keenan is pretty darned sure what would fuel the old cuss in Ireland today. The beers and the Jamesons flow like water in his seasonal offering, An Irish Carol, a hardened, touching, hilarious tour of a
An Irish Carol does a fine job capturing the spirit and message of Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale in an evening spent in an Irish pub. No small feat. The play, courtesy of author Matthew J. Keenan, is not a direct retelling of A Christmas Carol (and that’s a good thing, as the stage has no shortage of
If you need tidings of comfort and joy, look no further than the Keegan Theatre’s seventh annual production of An Irish Carol. This is the second year in a row that this reviewer has had the pleasure of seeing this irreverent and heart-warming gem, and I can say that it only improves upon further acquaintance.
Now in its seventh year, the Keegan Theatre’s annual production of Matthew J. Keenan’s An Irish Carol has become a favorite Washington DC holiday tradition. It’s easy to see why. A quintessentially Irish take on Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, Keenan’s play offers a holiday-perfect tale of redemption and the power of love. All joie de vivre seems to have been