Dialect Is Destiny
It’s remarkable that a play about phonetics as a predictor of socioeconomic class would become an enduringly popular musical.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
Lady’s Choice
There’s been a weird little theme this season of new musicals at major South Bay and Peninsula theaters based on 1890s British comedies by great Irish wits. First was the world premiere of Being Earnest at TheatreWorks in April, transplanting Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest to swingin’ 1960s London, and now San Jose Repertory Theatre gives us the West Coast premiere of A Minister’s Wife, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Candida. The musical debuted at Writers’ Theatre in 2009 in the Chicago suburb of Glencoe, conceived and directed by the company’s artistic director, Michael Halberstam. It went on to play New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in 2011, and now comes to San Jose in a new production directed by Halberstam.
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.
Female Shavianism
From Mrs. Warren to Joan of Arc, George Bernard Shaw adored his strong women characters, and was fierce in his condemnation of the gender inequality in Victorian society. His 1895 play Candida takes an interesting approach to this concern, using the situation of one man in love with another man’s wife to explore which gender really holds the power in a traditional married household.
Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth
Ever since Jonathan Moscone started adding late 19th and early 20th century classics into California Shakespeare Theater’s seasons early in his decade as artistic director, the company has done an outstanding job with the works of George Bernard Shaw, Anton Chekhov and Oscar Wilde. Former San Jose Rep artistic director Timothy Near, who helmed Cal Shakes’s near-perfect 2008 production of Uncle Vanya, now takes on George Bernard Shaw’s 1893 play Mrs. Warren’s Profession, which was initially banned for its no-nonsense discussion of prostitution and particularly of society’s culpability for providing few economic alternatives for women.
