Listening to the Bengsons
They’re running out of living, so a young couple decides to live a full 60 years together in the 100 days they have left.
My review of the Bengsons’ sublime indie-rock musical Hundred Days is on KQED Arts. Read more
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.
A Real American Hero
This year’s Mime Troupe show revels in melodrama, casting the greedy investment banker as the strapping hero and the destitute Occupy organizer as the sneering villain. Just like any right-thinking American would! You can read all about it in today’s Marin Independent Journal, available here.
Through the Cracks
Who hasn’t wondered what his or her life would be like if, well, everything were different? It’s the sort of reflection that nobody really indulges in when everything’s going well, but that tends to consume one’s mind when one’s life seems to be going nowhere. That certainly describes the siblings in Lauren Yee’s new play Crevice: Liz is a jobless 27-year old Ivy League grad who recently caught her fiancé cheating on her and now never leaves the couch (a strikingly similar situation to that of a character in Kim Rosenstock’s dark comedy Tigers Be Still, but that’s a very different story). Rob, 29, is supposedly an actor but hasn’t worked in years, and both of them are still living with their mom, waiting for something to happen. And something does. Liz and Rob get a taste of what might have been when they slip through a crack in the floor into a parallel world in which their every wish has come true, and that’s not necessarily good news.
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.
Trouble’s a Bruin
THEATER REVIEW: SAN FRANCISCO
Show #77: Exit, Pursued by a Bear, Crowded Fire Theatre Company, August 20.
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).
