An August Ensemble
Marin Theatre Company kicks off its 50th season with August: Osage County.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
The Queen Anne Bible
MTC’s Anne Boleyn radically reenvisions “the harlot queen” as the mother of the Anglican Church.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. Read more
Baker’s Quarter-Dozen
For someone whose work was unseen in the Bay Area before this year, East Coast playwright Annie Baker is suddenly all over the place: Body Awareness at Aurora in February, The Aliens at SF Playhouse in March, and now Circle Mirror Transformation at Marin Theatre Company. I reviewed the latter in the Marin Independent Journal, conveniently readable right over here.
This List Goes to ’11
It’s a good problem to have: Looking over the list of the 118 local shows I saw this year, I had a hard time narrowing it down to a Top Ten. There are plenty of ways in which 2011 was a tough, lousy, no-good year, but in terms of what I saw on the Bay Area stage, it was pretty damn good. It was a great year for solo shows, between the Marsh (Marga Gomez’s Not Getting Any Younger, Don Reed’s The Kipling Hotel and Geoff Hoyle’s Geezer) and Berkeley Rep (Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and The Last Cargo Cult, Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy and Rita Moreno’s Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup). There were a couple of great visiting performances by screen stars: Kevin Spacey as Richard III, John Malkovich as mass murderer Jack Unterweger. And there were any number of other shows that thoroughly charmed me in one respect or another but didn’t quite crack the Top Ten: Crowded Fire and Asian American Theatre Company’s Songs of the Dragons Crying to Heaven, Sleepwalkers Theatre’s The Nature Line, Shotgun Players’ Beardo and Care of Trees, Impact’s Disassembly, SF Playhouse’s Tigers Be Still. As for what did make it onto the list, I tried to rank them in order of preference, but no matter how many times I tweak it the ranking feels arbitrary. So let’s say that, like one’s own children, I love them all equally, and just hope they buy that.
Rockin’ Verona
California Shakespeare Theater is doing more Shakespeare than usual this season. Since Jonathan Moscone took over as artistic director in 2000, he’s brought in more than the occasional non-Shakespeare production the company had done before that but at least one play by someone else each year, and since 2004 it’s been half-and-half. This season’s four plays are also split evenly between the Bard and other authors—there’s Titus Andronicus and Taming of the Shrew alongside Shaw’s Candida—but in a way there are three Shakespearean works in the mix because the one completely new play, The Verona Project, is based on Two Gentlemen of Verona, sometimes believed to be William Shakespeare’s first play, and far from his best.
Rock’s Progress
If you’re really, really looking forward to seeing Rock of Ages this spring (featuring “the mind-blowing, face-melting hits of Journey” et al.), you may want to tide yourself over by checking out a much smaller-scale ’80s-style rock musical finishing up its run in San Francisco this week.
Old Year, New Blog
Top Ten Theater Productions of 2009
Although I started 2009 reviewing theater for one paper and ended the year reviewing for another, when I look over the list of the 108 shows I saw over the course of the year to determine my top ten, I realize that none of my favorite shows are ones that I actually reviewed. Those respective papers have space, money and geographical constraints, and it just happened that there was no overlap between the shows in my review docket and those in this year’s top ten.
