Lady Windermere’s Fan Club
A stunning local cast makes a sparkling Oscar Wilde classic a must-see at Cal Shakes. You can read my review over on KQED Arts.
The Importance of Being Wilde
There must be something in the water in the South Bay and Peninsula. TheatreWorks has unveiled a new musical version of Oscar Wilde’s classic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest in Mountain View, not long before San Jose Rep opens another musical adaptation of a great British play of the 1890s written by a renowned Irish wit: A Minister’s Wife, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Candida. While the latter is set in the original period, Being Earnest has been transplanted to the swinging London of the 1960s for some reason, or for no reason at all.
And Then There’s Maud
San Francisco playwright/director Mark Jackson started a fruitful relationship with Berkeley’s Aurora Theatre Company with his 2006 production of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. While Shotgun Players across town has premiered many of Jackson’s own works as a writer/director, his work with Aurora up till now has been strictly as a director, focused on inventive stagings of classics such as August Strindberg’s Miss Julie and a new adaptation of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Now Aurora has commissioned a new play that goes right back to Salome with Salomania, about onetime San Franciscan dancer Maud Allan.
