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
Divided Loyalties
Danai Gurira’s The Convert is a wrenching battle between traditional culture and colonial “civilization.”
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.
Words Without End
The primary selling point of Scorched is Oscar-nominated actor David Strathairn’s return to his native San Francisco for his second show at American Conservatory Theater, where he previously starred in artistic director Carey Perloff’s 1996 production of The Tempest. All the poster and flyer art is a close-up of his face, even though he’s strictly in a supporting role in the play. His may the primary male role, but this play belongs strictly to the women. Strathairn is, however, easily the best thing about the production.
Rave Reviews
This week in the Marin Independent Journal, I reviewed Marcus; or The Secret of Sweet, ACT’s conclusion of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother Sister Plays, and also reviewed Cinnabar’s double bill of Jack Paglen’s new comedy We (Heart) U, Nosferatu with Menotti’s opera The Medium. And you know what? They’re really, really good. So you should go check out those reviews, and check out those shows too while you’re at it.
That Scamp Scapin
If there’s one thing that drives me up the wall, it’s slapstick. I’m not talking about physical comedy onstage or onscreen—that stuff’s great, at least when done well. What I can’t stand is when slapstick happens in real life, when inanimate objects can’t commit to being inanimate and start falling and flying all over the place. When the world seems to be working at cross-purposes with you—or what Sartre called the “coefficient of adversity”—that’s when things get frustrating.
It Will Have Blood
For a play that’s supposedly cursed, whose title theater people make a big show of not speaking aloud, the bloody tragedy Macbeth is performed so often that it’s a credit to William Shakespeare that it retains as much power as it does the umpteenth time around. And it’s a credit to director Joel Sass and his strong, multitasking cast that the California Shakespeare Theater production feels as electrifying as if it were entirely unfamiliar and perilous ground.
Chalked up to Experience
Director John Doyle previously came to American Conservatory Theater to kick off the national tour of his acclaimed stripped-down Broadway staging of Sweeney Todd, in which all the instruments were played by the actors. Now he’s back at ACT taking a similar tack with the core acting company and a few ACT MFA students on Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new translation by local actress Domenique Lozano.
