Think Inside the Box
The cool thing about Stuck Elevator, the latest world premiere at American Conservatory Theater, is that it’s a sung-through musical about a Chinese delivery guy getting stuck in the elevator of a Bronx apartment building for 81 hours without food or water. That’s also the problematic thing about it. The show’s based on a true story, and while the fact of this guy getting stuck in an elevator is fascinating, actually watching someone stuck in an elevator gets tedious after a while. The creators of the play have to work very, very hard to keep things interesting, and the strain shows.
Snakes and Lovers
It’s interesting that The White Snake comes to Berkeley Rep hot on the heels of this summer’s big stink over the casting of The Nightingale at La Jolla Playhouse, the latest musical from the Spring Awakening team of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater. Based on a Hans Christian Andersen story set in ancient China, the latter show was criticized for having hardly any Asians in the cast, with the emperor of China played by a white guy. Like that show, writer/director Mary Zimmerman’s latest is set in ancient China and—like most of her productions—features a multiethnic cast, albeit one with more Asian actors than the La Jolla show, especially in the lead roles.
Cycle of Abuse
Let’s get this out of the way first. Dael Orlandersmith’s solo show at Berkeley Repertory Theatre is very good, but man, it’s not pleasant. Black n Blue Boys/Broken Men is a series of portraits of abused young boys, most but not all of them speaking as adults, or as close to adulthood as they’ve managed to get while grappling with the demons of their childhood. If that’s the sort of thing you’re going to find triggering, go in forewarned.
Play’s the Thing
The announcement late last year that American Conservatory Theater would be staging Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Play this season in lieu of the previously scheduled Twelfth Night was great news on several counts: It would feature the return of world-class physical comic Bill Irwin to the ACT stage, it would be another always-welcome opportunity to savor the challenging texts of the modernist pioneer, and after artistic director Carey Perloff’s lackluster productions of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore I hadn’t been looking forward to her staging of Shakespeare’s popular comedy.
Hollywood Neverending
American Conservatory Theater has kicked off its season with an oddity: Once in a Lifetime, a revival of a 1930 Hollywood satire by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, the writing team much, much better known for the comedies You Can’t Take It With You and The Man Who Came to Dinner.
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.
