Todd Scofield: Last News

Ink (★★★☆☆), co-produced by Round House and Olney, combines a talented cast with titillating text for a thorough chronicle of Rupert Murdoch’s typically rude 1969 takeover of British tabloid The Sun.Cody Nickell, portraying the paper’s exacting editor Larry Lamb, supplies the steady, galvanizing force that drives the story of how Lamb, handpicked by Australian media baron Murdoch (Andrew Rein), assembled a ragtag squad of Fleet Street vets who would carry out Rupe’s directive to create a paper for the people. Its first act structured as a countdown to The Sun‘s unlikely launch, the production gathers steam as Lamb gathers his A-team.Yet, there’s one workhorse in this production who often upstages D.C.

Our Town (★★★★☆) at the Shakespeare Theatre expressively conjures an entire population and bygone way of American life.They were bygone days in 1938 when Thorton Wilder wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set just after the turn of the century in bucolic Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire. Wilder directed in the text that the action should unfold on a bare stage, where the span of a life might be measured over the twelve years spent with the citizenry of this small town.Bustling underneath the sturdy, arching beams of set designer Wilson Chin’s wood-frame theater-within-a-theater, Paul’s excellent cast do evoke not just the tapestry of family ties and neighborly disputes in Grover’s Corners, but also a vibrant sense of the landscape.In their eyes, we can see the sunflowers and butternut trees, smell the sweet scent of heliotrope on a moonlit night.