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
American History Mex
California Shakespeare Theater’s season opener, Richard Montoya’s American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose, is completely bonkers. KQED Arts has my review.
If You’re Happy and You Know It
Walter Wells is happy. Way, way too happy. So happy that you know that playwright Julie Marie Myatt has it in for him in The Happy Ones at Magic Theatre. KQED Arts has my review.
Fathers and Sons
It’s a remarkable coincidence: In the last couple of weeks both Berkeley Repertory Theatre and American Conservatory Theater have opened plays about sons grappling with their memories of their fathers, both prominent Bay Area figures of the 1970s. Ghost Light at Berkeley Rep is a fictionalized play based on California Shakespeare Theater artistic director Jonathan Moscone contending with the specter of his father, the assassinated San Francisco mayor George Moscone. Humor Abuse is Lorenzo Pisoni’s one-man show about growing up as a baby clown in San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus under the unrelenting tutelage of his father, Pickles founder and clown Larry Pisoni (who thankfully is still around and was in the audience opening night).
This List Goes to ’11
It’s a good problem to have: Looking over the list of the 118 local shows I saw this year, I had a hard time narrowing it down to a Top Ten. There are plenty of ways in which 2011 was a tough, lousy, no-good year, but in terms of what I saw on the Bay Area stage, it was pretty damn good. It was a great year for solo shows, between the Marsh (Marga Gomez’s Not Getting Any Younger, Don Reed’s The Kipling Hotel and Geoff Hoyle’s Geezer) and Berkeley Rep (Mike Daisey’s The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs and The Last Cargo Cult, Anna Deavere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy and Rita Moreno’s Rita Moreno: Life Without Makeup). There were a couple of great visiting performances by screen stars: Kevin Spacey as Richard III, John Malkovich as mass murderer Jack Unterweger. And there were any number of other shows that thoroughly charmed me in one respect or another but didn’t quite crack the Top Ten: Crowded Fire and Asian American Theatre Company’s Songs of the Dragons Crying to Heaven, Sleepwalkers Theatre’s The Nature Line, Shotgun Players’ Beardo and Care of Trees, Impact’s Disassembly, SF Playhouse’s Tigers Be Still. As for what did make it onto the list, I tried to rank them in order of preference, but no matter how many times I tweak it the ranking feels arbitrary. So let’s say that, like one’s own children, I love them all equally, and just hope they buy that.
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.
Reworking the Classics
I have not one but two reviews in today’s Marin Independent Journal: the cheeky Raisin in the Sun companion piece Clybourne Park at ACT and the new translation of Chekhov’s Seagull at Marin Theatre Company. You can follow the links in the last sentence to read all about ’em.
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.
Sprawling Pastures
There was an appropriately agricultural scent in the air for opening night of California Shakespeare Theater’s world premiere of John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven. The company’s brand new Sharon Simpson Center with café, store, offices and the like under a verdant living roof was not quite completed, and the prosperous smell of fertilizer wafted through the outdoor amphitheater.
