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Showing posts with label Seville. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seville. Show all posts

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Raucous “The Hunchback of Seville” fits the WET audience taste to a “V”

Maria Knox and Samie Detzer (photo by Cassandra Bell)
The Hunchback of Seville
By Charise Castro Smith
Directed by Jen Wineman
Starring Samie Detzer, Libby Barnard, Rose Cano, Maria Knox
Through June 30, 2014

Washington Ensemble Theatre doesn’t do plays most other companies would do very often. Their tastes run to bizarre, outlandish, boundary-stretching, unconventional, fantastical, and other such adjectives that denote unusual theater choices. Their world-premiere presentation of The Hunchback of Seville by Charise Castro Smith fits them very well (the “V” in the header).

Castro Smith and director Jen Wineman brought their baby to WET via the outreach that former Ensemble member and Yale graduate Michael Place enabled. They brought their project as a team and agreed that they would both come and be resident during a development process that resulted in Castro Smith being present for a month of rehearsals. Devin Bannon, an Ensemble member, says that is “unprecedented” in their history of developing scripts.