The Glorious Fall of Bay Area Theater
Tis the season for fall picks.
Check out my autumnal roundup on KQED Arts. Read more
Super, Thanks for Asking
I was bummed to miss Super:Anti:Reluctant the first time around, in 2006, because I’m interested in the San Francisco ensemble Mugwumpin’s collaboratively devised work, and it’s a whole show themed around superheroes. I don’t want to shock you or anything, but I’m a big ol’ geek about superheroes. Fortunately, Mugwumpin’s celebrating its tenth anniversary with a celebration mysteriously titled Mugwumpin10 (what could it possibly mean?!), which includes revivals of favorite old pieces such as S:A:R and 2010’s
This Is All I Need. Mugwumpin was going to follow these revivals in rep with the premiere of a new piece in September, Blockbuster Season, but the show has had to be postponed for health reasons. Read more
Shift Happens
The New Settlers would like to show you their compound before a cosmic rift splits reality asunder and they cross over to build a New America on the other side. Welcome to Mugwumpin’s latest collaboratively developed theater piece puts you right in the thick of…something. I give you the full report at KQED Arts.
Tesla Foiled
It’s hard to imagine what Future Motive Power would have been like if the ensemble Mugwumpin hadn’t managed to obtain use of San Francisco’s Old Mint to stage it in. It’s not that the Mint has anything to do with the story of inventor and electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla being told in the collaboratively devised performance piece, but so much of the experience is defined by the interactive experience of the crowd moving through the historic building’s basements and vaults at the prompting of the actors that one wonders what people would get out of it in a traditional theater space.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to ten, which is probably a good sign: that’s a far better problem to have than not being able to think of ten good ones. I limited myself to shows that actually opened in 2010, which disqualifies shows like Ann Randolph’s hilarious monologue Loveland that otherwise would be high on my list. Most links are to my original reviews earlier in the year, and the shows are more or less in order of preference.
We Need This
The San Francisco performance ensemble Mugwumpin went through a rebirth in the last year after the departure of cofounder Denmo Ibrahim, with a bunch of new members brought into the company and a new structure to the season, in which a series of thematically related one-shot site-specific performances culminate in the creation of the year’s full-length theatrical production. This inaugural season was designated the Year of Possessions, a topic explored from multiple angles in the spellbinding patchwork that is the season centerpiece, This Is All I Need.
