Bun in the Oven, Fire in the Loins
Shotgun Players gets uncomfortable with Penelope Skinner’s The Village Bike.
Read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Read more
A Better Mousetrap
Shotgun Players plays ubiquitous Agatha Christie whodunit with just enough camp to make its flaws into virtues.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Talk and Talk and Talk About a Revolution
Shotgun Players is taking on The Coast of Utopia,Tom Stoppard’s mammoth trilogy about the budding Russian intellectual life of the mid-19th century, planting seeds for the revolution that will come much later. Having done chapter one, Voyage, last year, Shotgun now presents part two, Shipwreck, in repertory with a limited revival of Voyage. My review‘s up on KQED Arts for the intrepid explorer.
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.
