Buddha Call
Tanya Shaffer’s self-produced musical with songwriter Vienna Teng, The Fourth Messenger, is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining exploration of the life of the Buddha as a 21st century woman, and the investigative reporter who’s out to expose her. You can read all about it over on KQED Arts.
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.
Quite Becoming
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #126: Becoming Julia Morgan, The Julia Morgan Project, December 19.
The Drums of War
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY
Show #93: The Salt Plays, Part One: In the Wound, Shotgun Players, September 11.
