Double Your Fun
Impact Theatre’s Looney Tunes Comedy of Errors is a riot.
Read my review in the San Jose Mercury News. Read more
Trail and Error
The westward migration, the video game, the stage play:
My review of The Oregon Trail is in the Oakland Tribune and other Bay Area News Group papers. Read more
King Richard’s Limp
Impact Theatre’s Richard III is unusually slow for either the company or the play.
My review is in the Oakland Tribune and other BANG papers. Read more
The Anguish of the Battlecock
Ever wonder what goes through the head of a cockfighting rooster? Wonder no more!
My review of Impact Theatre’s Year of the Rooster is in the Contra Costa Times. Read more
Troy, Troy Again
Impact Theatre goes way back to the Trojan War in its latest high-octane staging of Shakespeare. My review is on KQED Arts.
Out of the Woods (and into the Bar)
Impact Theatre gets gender-bent with an As You Like It where Celia’s a dude, them Dukes are double dutchesses, the melancholy Jaques is a female hipster, and the forest of Arden is a Northern California bar. I give you
a full report over on KQED Arts. Read more
A Tighter Titus
Titus Andronicus is William Shakespeare’s bloodiest tragedy, and for centuries it was also generally considered to be his worst. Although the playwright’s contemporaries loved it, it wouldn’t regain popularity until after Word War II, when all the play’s hand-chopping, child-killing, rape, decapitation and cannibalism no longer seemed as outlandish as it once did. In the age of the slasher flick, Titus’s Grand Guignol elements are once again its primary selling point.
Lock Up Your Teenagers
When I heard that Impact Theatre artistic director Melissa Hillman was going to be helming Romeo and Juliet this year, the tag lines started to write themselves in my mind (“never was a story of more whoa”–that sort of thing). Although Impact specializes in new plays, Hillman’s own stagings for the company each year have been fast-paced productions of Shakespeare (or other classics like John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore).
Ethnical Difficulties
It’s funny that the night after I saw The Breach, in which racist imagery is offered up as an exhibit of the continuing harmful legacy of slavery, I’d see a show that’s also critiquing ethnic stereotypes, this time by gleefully reveling in their very offensiveness. Impact Theatre’s world premiere of Enrique Urueta’s Learn to Be Latina is an often screamingly funny show offering a heaping helping of “oh no he didn’t,” plus what’s no doubt the most priceless glory hole moment I’ve ever seen on stage.
