Carrie Bears Reexamination
The same night Dolores Claiborne the opera closes, Carrie the Musical opens. Coincidence or conspiracy? My investigation is on KQED Arts, including an examination of how Stephen King’s protagonists are like the X-Men.
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.
Hello, Foxes!
Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play The Little Foxes may be set in 1900, but the subject matter has something to say to the present day, being essentially about the rich screwing over common folk (and each other) to become even more rich. A new-money family on the rise in the South, the Hubbards are so hungry to make a profit that they’re willing to stoop to pretty much anything to make it happen. Having married into a cotton plantation, they’re wooing a northern cotton mill to come to town and stand to make millions on the deal, but they need the investment of sister Regina’s estranged, terminally ill husband to make it happen.
Family Portrait
There sure are a lot of plays about wealthy Manhattanites. I guess that makes sense, because New York is a large theater market, a lot of playwrights choose to live there, and wealthy Manhattanites are a significant target market. But a lot of these plays wind up playing, and even premiering, in San Francisco, to the point where it feels like there are more plays on our stages about the lives and concerns of the New York rich than anything that might speak to ordinary San Franciscans. It’s the cultural imperialism of the Empire State, and local theaters seem to be only too happy to bow down before it.
