Good “Fences” from Good Neighbors
Cal Shakes’s Fences brings maternal power to a tale of fathers and sons.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
You Got Your Jazz in My Gem
If you think the trouble with August Wilson is it needs more interpretive dance, Marin has the show for you.
Read my review in the Marin Independent Journal. 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.
It’s a Motherfucker
The San Francisco Playhouse gives Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker with the Hat its West Coast premiere, and it’s a motherfucker of a show. I reviewed it over at KQED Arts, where I had to be a bit coyer about the name. I did, however, get to say “there’s a veritable fluffload of profanity in the show.”
A Classic with Spunk
Spunk is a bit of a departure for California Shakespeare Theater. It was just a decade ago that then-new artistic director Jonathan Moscone started adding modern classics to the company’s steady diet of Shakespeare—plays by Wilder, Chekhov, Shaw, Wilde, Beckett and Coward. And then the adaptations of classics: David Edgar’s Dickens; Amy Freed’s Restoration comedies; Octavio Solis’s Steinbeck stories; Amanda Dehnert’s Shakespeare rock musical. Now Cal Shakes looks beyond dead white men for its latest presentation of an adapted classic: Spunk, George C. Wolfe’s acclaimed 1989 adaptation of a trio of short stories by seminal Harlem Renaissance author Zora Neale Hurston, three very different portraits of struggling African-Americans in rural Florida and big-city Harlem.
Playing Against the House
Everybody in Nobody Move is on the move. More specifically, they’re on the run. Gambler Jimmy Luntz is in hiding because he panicked and shot the thug who came to lean on him for bad debts. Booze-soaked Anita has been framed to take the fall for her recent ex-husband’s embezzlement scheme. The two of them meet on the road, and from then on they wait together for their respective trouble to catch up with them.
Ruination and Redemption
Suddenly there’s a small Lynn Nottage festival going on in the Bay Area, with two of the acclaimed contemporary playwright’s works running simultaneously on two sides of the bay: Ruined at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Lorraine Hansberry Theatre’s production of Fabulation, or The Re-Education of Undine at Fort Mason’s Southside Theater (across the hall from, and formerly part of, Magic Theatre).
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
