Theater Minis

OPENING

• The Comedy of Errors — Folger Theatre. Two sets of identical twins separated at birth create a case of mistaken identities and a circus of confusion in this Shakespeare classic. Opens Wednesday. 202/554-7077.

• Oh, Coward! — Olney Theatre Center for the Arts. The off-Broadway hit musical that spans the realm of Noel Coward’s comedy. Opens Wednesday. 301/924-3400.

• Senor Discretion Himself — Arena Stage, Fichandler Theater. The town drunk in a small Mexican village becomes its unwilling prophet in this world premiere musical. Opens tomorrow. 202/488-3300.

NOW PLAYING

• Cats — Toby’s Dinner Theatre — ***. Toby’s is one of the first theaters to attempt to re-create the kittenish allure of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical warhorse, which premiered on Broadway in 1982 and has just become available for regional productions. The intimacy of the space makes the show less of an empty spectacle and aligns it more closely with its source material, T.S. Eliot’s book “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” a dotty and keenly observed musing on mouser behavior. You do miss a complete orchestra, however, as the keyboard-heavy 10-piece orchestra strives not to sound rinky-dink. Matters are greatly aided by an emphasis on full-out choral singing. Costumes and makeup are captivating, and the actors give fetching portrayals of the show’s 26 cats. Through Aug. 8. 410/730-8311. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Elegies: A Song Cycle — Signature Theatre — ***1/2. Bring your own Kleenex to Signature Theatre’s hauntingly beautiful production of William Finn’s latest musical, a tender tribute to the people he has loved and lost over the years, a sung-through piece without any dialogue. The composer has a way of being eccentric and nontraditional without resorting to ironic distance, and a zippy neuroticism permeates his music. Director Joe Calarco’s five actors — Sherri Edelen, Will Gartshore, Larry D. Hylton, Donna Migliaccio and Michael Sharp — acquit themselves with polished, impassioned performances. Yet this glorious musical goes beyond mourning and looking back — it urges us to look up. Through May 9. 703/218-6500. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Fathers and Sons — Stanislavsky Theater Studio — . Turgenev’s 1862 novel raised in a still firmly czarist Russia the divisive issues of class structure, socialism, and revolution: Two old Russian families are trapped in traditionalism even as their own sons, university students influenced by the latest radical ideas, rebel against them. Irish playwright Brian Friel’s adaptation, first performed in 1987, carves the essence out of the powerful tale. Yet this yawn-inducing new production is more an endurance contest than a provocative evening of drama. Mr. Friel’s dialogue is windy and didactic, and director Andrei Malaev-Babel’s sense of pacing is funereal: His characters shuffle about like zombies, and each of the many pregnant pauses seems to last a full nine months. “Fathers and Sons” is still best experienced as a novel. Through April 25 at the Church Street Theater. 800/494-8497. Reviewed by T.L. Ponick.

• A Flag is Born — American Century Theater — . Ben Hecht’s screed about the need for a Jewish homeland has not been produced in 56 years. After seeing this torpid production, you can only conclude that some works wither in obscurity for a reason. Fans of Mr. Hecht’s quick, sharp wit may be surprised by the unabashed, start-to-finish agitprop. It’s a one-act dose of NyQuil that is distinguished only for its uniformly bad acting, and staging that would make the Ice Age seem like a quickie. As a play, “A Flag is Born” flies at half-mast. Through April 24 at Theater II, Gunston Arts Center. 703/553-8782. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Henry IV, Part 2 — The Shakespeare Theatre — **. “Henry IV, Part 1” examines the impetuousness and wastrel ways of youth. Its companion, Part 2, is often thought of as a richer experience because of its burnished treatment of old age. This production, directed at a processional pace by Bill Alexander, captures the long nap of aging and death almost too well. The gloomy wooden set does little to lift one’s spirits, nor does the uninspired staging. Thankfully, both plays feature the irascible figure of Falstaff, played with zaftig bonhomie by Ted van Griethuysen. In fact, the more seasoned actors run off with the play: Christopher Kelly is a flaccid Prince Hal, outclassed at every turn by Keith Baxter’s burning Henry IV. Emery Battis is a hoot as Justice Silence. So maturity rules, yet the staging would be better with some youthful spice. Through May 2. 202/547-1122. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Homebody/Kabul — Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Theatre J — ***1/2. Director John Vreeke has a genius for taking dense material and spinning it into something unexpectedly magical and immediate. He’s done it again with a wrenchingly affecting and beautifully acted production of Tony Kushner’s nearly four-hour play, in which a British housewife takes off for adventure in the Taliban’s Afghanistan, only to disappear and leave her daughter and husband searching the country for her. Mr. Vreeke has taken a wordy, political play and made it into a moving study of what happens to human beings assaulted by tragedy and flux. Through Sunday at the D.C. Jewish Community Center. 800/494-8497. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Slow Dance on the Killing Ground — Everyman Theatre — ***. The three main characters in playwright William Hanley’s compelling 1964 drama are on the lam, from their own false selves. All three wind up in a musty old candy store in Brooklyn late one night and by dawn the three have killed the personas that shield them and cut them off from an authentic life. The characters learn there is “something better” out there other than lives built on secrets and lies. Director Jennifer L. Nelson choreographs the play as if it were a jazz-fueled dance piece, and the actors dive in with relish. Yet the drama feels overlong and padded, and some of the flights of language, so wild and startling in the beginning, overstay their welcome and become boring. Through April 18. 410/752-2208. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Sweeney Todd — Center Stage — ***1/2. Irene Lewis, artistic director at Baltimore’s Center Stage, daringly eliminates most of the Victorian era and music hall trappings that dominate many a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Grand Guignol masterpiece. She opts instead for something darker, sleeker and altogether more vampiric, with a Goth-punk edge that owes as much to The Cure as it does to Bertolt Brecht. While the overall level falls short of the steamy production at the Kennedy Center two years ago, it gains in sheer verve what it may lack in resources. Sondheim purists might squawk, but those with open minds are in for a show that puts over the gorgeous material in electrifying and prickly ways. Through Sunday. 410/332-0033. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

• Yellowman — Arena Stage, Kreeger Theater — **1/2. Dael Orlandersmith’s bold, poetic two-person play examines the hierarchy of color in black society and how damaging it can be to equate lighter skin with attractiveness and superiority. Set in the 1960s and ’70s, the play gives us the dark, nappy-haired Alma (Laiona Michelle) and the light-skinned Eugene (Howard W. Overshown), both raised — in backwoods South Carolina households that are dens of booze and violence — by people who hate them for the way they look. The power of their love carries “Yellowman” to epic heights, yet the play falters in the second act, when it all dissolves into an unwelcome and unnecessary blast of ghoulish melodrama, a glob of alcoholism, miscarriage and murder. Through April 18. 202/488-3300. Reviewed by Jayne Blanchard.

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS