The Wedding Zinger
Center REP’s wedding musical is a welcome surprise.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
It’s Not About Art
Yasmina Reza’s ever-popular Art is really about the nature of friendship.
Read my review in the East Bay Times. Read more
Ms. Dawn Goes to Washington
A 1940s comedy proves surprisingly timely at Center REP.
Read my review in the Contra Costa Times and other BANG papers. Read more
C’mon-a Rosemary’s Life
Was there more to Rosemary Clooney than ethnic novelty songs in an egregious Italian accent?
Read my review of Tenderly: The Rosemary Clooney Musical in the Contra Costa Times to find out! Read more
I Get a Kick Out of Cole
Anything Goes has so many classic Cole Porter songs in it that it’s a wonder it’s an original book musical from which those songs originate rather than some greatest-hits musical revue.
Read my review in the Contra Costa Times Read more
Back Down the Rabbit Hole
An octogenerian Alice takes one last trip to the fantastical land of her youth.
My review of Wunderworld is in the Contra Costa Times. Read more
Singing in the Basement
Hey, it’s my first review in the Contra Costa Times! Go forth and
read my review of Center REP’s doo-wop popsical Life Could Be a Dream. Read more
Antisocial Media
Facebook is the rabbit hole of the internet. If you’ve ever had an account (and most readers probably do), you have no doubt spent hours looking old acquaintances up, looking through their posted photos and little details of their lives, or just watched the feed scroll by of items posted by people you used to know in real life, or maybe even people you just felt like you ought to know.
It’s a Shame About the War
It’s clear as soon as you enter the theater at Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts that Center REPertory Company is taking a fanciful approach to Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 romantic comedy about people with dangerously lighthearted notions of what it means to fight in a war.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
