Plight of the Mockingbird
If only To Kill a Mockingbird could be comfortably considered a period piece after all this time.
Read my review in the Mercury News. Read more
Back on Avenue Q
Berkeley Playhouse produces its very first adult show.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Consider the Yeasts
Ray of Light Theatre has managed to do something pretty remarkable with its 2014 season; there are almost no human characters in it at all. I say “almost” only because there was briefly a human narrator (Morgan Freeman, actually) in
Triassic Parq this June, but other than that it was all dinosaurs. And now Ray of Light goes back even further down the evolutionary ladder to a time when the only life on earth was salt-sucking yeasts. Read more
Blood Red, White and Blue
The presidential debates are upon us, Election Day is just a few weeks away, and two local theater companies are getting into the spirit of the thing by staging gleefully perverse musicals about the U.S. presidency.
Assassin Nation
That Stephen Sondheim has picked some perverse subjects for his musicals shouldn’t be much of a surprise to anyone, given that one of his most beloved classics concerns a certain serial-killing barber who provides the secret ingredient for his neighbor’s meat pie shop. But a musical about the various people who have killed or attempted to kill the President of the United States from John Wilkes Booth down to John Hinckley Jr.? Now that’s really pushing the boundaries of good taste.
