Timothy Douglas: Last News

Nine Night (★★★☆☆) looks as lived-in as any house you’re likely to see onstage. Clearly, many lives connect under this roof, inside the comfy, middle-class London home of Jamaican matriarch Gloria.The deeply-built set of Gloria’s living room, kitchen, and foyer, designed by Tim Mackabee, is dense with detail and decorated to within an inch of its linoleum-floored life with mismatched furniture, family photos, plants, and knickknacks.It’s over-decorated, for sure, but we can well imagine that the abundance — clutter to some — is exactly as Gloria would have wanted it.

The royally enjoyable cast of Signature Theatre’s The Color Purple (★★★★★) forges a chain of love with no weak links in Timothy Douglas’ knockout staging of the musical based on Alice Walker’s novel and the acclaimed 1985 motion picture.The show marks a milestone for Signature, which, according to artistic director Matthew Gardiner, had developed plans a decade ago for a take on the musical, fresh off a two-year Broadway run of the original Tony-winning production.But those plans were scuttled due to John Doyle’s 2015 Broadway revival starring powerhouses Cynthia Erivo, Jennifer Hudson, and Danielle Brooks.Eventually that production made its way to D.C. in the modified form of a Broadway touring company which, frankly, left a lot of the meat of this turbulent, decades-spanning drama still on the bone.