“Nigel Semaj's choreography makes the most of the production's multiple locations while feeling familiar to RENT fans with just enough edge to keep things fresh.”

Diversionary Theatre has announced the full cast and creative team for its Legacy Revival of RENT, with book, music, and lyrics by Jonathan Larson. The production will begin low-cost previews May 21, with a press opening set for May 30 at Diversionary Theatre.

In the prologue of I Know How to Curse: a re-blackening of shakespeare, writer-actor Gerrad Alex Taylor sits down at a fake grand piano. He hits a few wrong notes. The volume is a little low. But Taylor plays through it — calm, confident, in command of the stage. Already just a few minutes into this production, Taylor and director Nigel Semaj have drawn on a series of loaded images — the puffy white gloves of Mickey Mouse, and other references to minstrelsy or blackface. The theatrical aesthetic of this world premiere production at Perisphere Theater — where Taylor is co-artistic director — is deliberate and direct.

It’s hysterical and powerful. Gerrad Alex Taylor has crafted a world that feels cartoony, surreal, and human all at once. 

In DC, the unsung heroes of impactful theater inspired by the classics appear to be small theaters with eclectic artists who have something to say. Black artists reclaiming minstrel shows have been a recent, unusual, yet powerful trend in DC theaters.

That search for truth brought Semaj to the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) Agora Institute as part of the 2025–26 Visiting Fellows cohort. The program draws participants doing complementary work in diverse fields that advance the SNF Agora Institute’s mission of promoting civil dialogue and civic engagement. As the institute’s inaugural Artist in Residence, Semaj is spending the year collaborating with faculty, students, and peers to test ideas about participation, trust, and shared power through artistic practice.

Semaj isn’t too fussed with keeping the text pure, which is a relief, sometimes the fusion of Olde Englishe with common vernacular ends up absolutely tortured. Instead, they use it where it makes sense, drop it where it doesn’t. This results in an intentional pastiche, emphasizing a fascinating slip slide along timelines that are at points sweeping (like, the 1400s) and other times much more intimate (the sweet beginnings of a doomed relationship). The dialogue succeeds because it sounds like the sorts of conversations you hear out in the alley, feet killing you during a smoke break, funny and weird, and just a little bit heartbreaking.

Nigel Semaj has been awarded a Ruby Arts Fund Award To support An Enemy To the People, a new research-driven adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, integrating physical theatre and public health research data to explore democracy, civic responsibility, and social justice.

I could tell, in experiencing Voyages: Chapter 7: Submerged! In the Company of Fish on Thursday evening (one night, only, unfortunately, sorry, pals), a collaboration between the National Aquarium and Submersive Productions, that I was being nudged to ponder some sort of artistic gate-crash into the Realm of Science. But “art” and “science” as human impulses are more similar than they are disparate.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University welcomes Nigel Semaj as the inaugural Artist in Residence at the SNF Agora Institute. In this role, they will explore how performance and embodiment can create space for civic dialogue, collective memory, and political imagination, bringing creative practice into the heart of democratic inquiry. Their work complements the institute’s mission to expand the forms and methods through which civic engagement can take shape.ere

But for me, it is the otherworldly, potent performance of Nigel Semaj that’s the take away, and when I tell you it is astonishingly good, you will believe me. Semaj plays a fox that drips, swishes, and oozes all over. If Bowie and Silver are this piece’s beating heart, the fox is the metaphysical one, the wild, brutal and untamed truth that nature may empathize at times, but she doesn’t have to care, and she is more than justified in her anger at us. Semaj pulls off a level of connection with the audience that made me hold my breath; it’s like they literally read our minds. Their command of the space is unparalleled, and their ultimate moment made me gasp out loud, it is that singular. I have seen a lot of theater, but I can’t think offhand of a performance that got me like this one, Semaj is almost spooky — delicious, specific, cruel, and knowing.

"If I’m making this seem kinda dark, well it is, but it’s my favorite kind: darkly goofy. Penguins are hella awkward on land (once they’re in the water, they make way more sense) and the actors have their movement vocabulary (thanks to Movement Director Nigel Semaj and Costume Designer Liz Dunlap) down to an artform, with hilarious results."

"If you’re somehow sitting in the audience without a speck of ongoing guilt about the state of our environment, you’re probably a cardboard seat-filler. But if not, you’ll certainly be affected by the profound nature metaphors and the flow of ecology commentary in this piece. Thanks to the laid-back script by U.K. Playwright Bryony Lavery and the skilled touch of Director Nigel Semaj, the message is not an overwhelming one. The young performers and the audience both seem to take relief in the fluffier moments that add an air of lightness to the thick undercurrent of Slime."

"Outside of all this business, and acting as a sort of fulcrum, is Nigel Semaj in the role of Fox. Fox is... a fox, neither bird nor human. Semaj is the only member of the ensemble who plays just the one role, and nearly all of their scenes are solo. These monologues, punctuating the narrative arc of the play from time to time, consist of solitary longings and murderous confessions from a character who refuses to be shut out of the family photo album. Semaj's dangerous loner vibe is even sweet at times, singling out one audience member for friendship, and others for playing with Fauna's beach ball, just before Fox deflates it in spite."

"See it if: you're interested in "Staged horror". Do not see it if: you're not into sci fi or speculative fiction. i very much enjoyed this ambitious show. rough around the edges, but that roughness only enhances the dystopian noir vibes. actors are enchanting with wonderful stage presence. i found the moments of horror to be very effective. live band on stage was RAD af. some very clever staging. see and have fun!"

"THIS WAS A COURSE ENVIRONMENT THAT I HAD NOT EXPERIENCED BEFORE AS WORKING WITH THE PROFESSOR, NIGEL, FELT MORE LIKE WORKING WITH A MENTOR AND CREATIVE DIRECTOR FOR A PRODUCTION THAN A PROFESSOR FOR A CLASS.”"