A Cesspool to Celebrate
There have been umpteen zillion variations and adaptations of Woyzeck, assembled from unsorted fragments that author Georg Büchner left when he died in 1837 at the age of 24. The Shotgun Players production under the direction of local auteur Mark Jackson uses a high-profile musical version from the year 2000, adapted by Ann-Christin Rommen and Wolfgang Wiens with a concept by original director Robert Wilson and songs by Tom Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan that Waits later recorded on his 2002 album Blood Money.
Girl Anachronism
American theater started as a criminal act. The first play performed in English in the colonies was Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe, a satirical stab at the English throne performed in rural Virginia in 1665. As Shakespeare’s contemporaries could attest a generation before, the Puritans were no fans of theater. Performing plays was a crime under their governance, and so was breaking the Sabbath—so this play performed in a tavern on Sunday was doubly forbidden, even disregarding any treasonous content. The show was reprised in a command performance in court, where it was judged harmless.
No One Expects the Russian Revolution
Shotgun Players’ 2008 premiere of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage was such a resounding success—winning the Glickman Award for best play to premiere in the Bay Area that year—that it’s no wonder that Shotgun commissioned Beowulf playwright Jason Craig and composer Dave Malloy to write another song-play for the company. Beardo is another raucous musical celebration of a legendary badass, this time Grigori Rasputin, the mystic “Mad Monk” who advised the last of the Russian Tsars, Nicholas II, and his wife, the Tsaritsa Alexandra.
