DC Theater Arts
- Highly Recommended
"...The Studio Theatre in its final production of the 2012-2013 subscription season presents Tom Stoppard's affecting award-winning drama, The Real Thing, in Studio's most intimate space, The Milton Theatre. Directed by David Muse, the 1984 Tony Award Winner for Best Play (beating out David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross) is staged in-the-round which required re-leveling the floors, moving seats, and creating a rotating circular set center to ease scene and set changes."
Washington Examiner
- Highly Recommended
"...Barrett Doss and Enrico Nassi also shine in tiny roles, while James Noone's revolving set keeps things visually interesting. Matthew Nielson's intricate sound design carries the arc of the story like an electrical current with its metaphorical soundtrack. It's a well-orchestrated production of an exceptionally eloquent and arresting play, one that tests and retests our perceptions of "The Real Thing.""
MetroWeekly
- Recommended
"...One of the things that separate playwright Tom Stoppard from the herd is his near ruthless assumption of his audience's intelligence, his plays racing with thoughts and ideas that wait for no man. For those starved for such challenges, his plays are like sex for the brain -- tangos in which the experience is not passive but active. To see The Real Thing is to go synapse-to-synapse or risk missing out on the intellectual ecstasies that lay beneath the witty and engaging merry-go-round of love affairs that make up its plot."
Washington City Paper
- Highly Recommended
"...This past weekend at Studio, the speech was getting an appreciative but more muted response, and that more or less sums up the effect of the capably performed but oddly uninvolving production as a whole. The Real Thing is a gorgeous piece of dramatic writing, trickily structured, with multiple plays within a play, and actors playing actors who somehow manage to be themselves on stage and someone else entirely at home. It's conceived as a dissertation not just on the power of language and of theater, but on the nature of love-and it ought, if it's done well, to take flight early, and stay airborne."
Washingtonian
- Somewhat Recommended
"...In Studio artistic director David Muse's production, Teagle F. Bougere (last seen at Studio in Invisible Man) plays Henry, with the excellent, magnetic Caroline Bootle Pendergast as his wife, Charlotte. Charlotte is performing with Max (Dan Domingues) in a play written by Henry, in which Max's character confronts Charlotte's character about her infidelity. But the real intrigue lies in the extramarital affair between Henry and Max's wife, the spirited Annie (Annie Purcell), whose idealism places her in sharp contrast with Charlotte's world-weary cynicism. (All characters deliver strong English and Scottish accents, thanks to dialect coach Gary Logan.)"
MD Theatre Guide
- Recommended
"...While The Real Thing is not necessarily for everyone, if you do go see it there is plenty to like. With a fine bunch of performers, great production elements, and Muse helming it all, The Real Thing is an early Stoppard piece that does deserve your time and attention."
DCTheatreScene
- Recommended
Have you given your life over to artifice, sacrificed authenticity for convention, hidden your real self from the public view? No? Well, you’re wearing pants, aren’t you? So, the question on the table in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing is
