Can You Hear Me Now?
“Nobody told me it was going to be this noisy going deaf.”
My review of Nina Raine’s Tribes at Berkeley Rep is on KQED Arts. Read more
Lady Windermere’s Fan Club
A stunning local cast makes a sparkling Oscar Wilde classic a must-see at Cal Shakes. You can read my review over on KQED Arts.
Oranges Are Blue
Whatever anyone expected from the first season longtime ACT actor Steven Anthony Jones programmed as artistic director of Lorraine Hansberry Theatre, San Francisco’s most venerable African-American theater company, it probably wasn’t a British play for one African-American and two Caucasian actors. But race and racism come up an awful lot in Blue/Orange, Joe Penhall’s 2000 play that played Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre back in 2005.
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.
