Tickety boo! Kneehigh, Berkeley Rep jazz up history in Adolphus Tips
Spirits are high at Berkeley Repertory Theatre this holiday season. What's interesting is that the merry-making on stage in 946: The Amazing Story of Adolphus Tips – the singing, dancing and general revelry – is all in service to a story about war and a little-known and avoidable tragedy that cost nearly 1,000 during World War II. So it's happy about sad, which makes sense given the theater company at work here is Kneehigh, the Cornwall-based troupe that has made various Bay Area splashes.
Berkeley Rep's Meow Meow: It's all feline and dandy
You get the impression, watching An Audience with Meow Meow that the star, a self-styled international singing sensation, and director Emma Rice would like nothing better than to destroy the theater and finish the show from the rubble. While audience members wipe blood from their faces and grapple with their broken bones, Meow Meow will persist in singing, making jokes and lamenting the state of the world. Stripped of all theatrical artifice, artist and audience will become one, and art will have saved the world.
That doesn't happen – well, not exactly. But Meow Meow and Rice do what they can to deconstruct a nightclub act and turn it into a substantial piece of theater.
Passion, ache and lots of great music in splendid Tristan
The thing about a love story is this: you want to feel it. You need to feel it. When Juliet wakes just after Romeo bites it, if you’re not feeling that dagger in your own chest, what’s the point?
There are only so many love stories – love gained, love lost, love unrequited – and so many variations. How, then, do you make the story fresh? How do you reignite the passions and make your audience feel it all anew?
The shortest answer to that query is: let Kneehigh tell the story.
Berkeley Rep's wildly wonderful Bride
Such joy. Such wicked, delicious, heart-pounding joy.
That's what it feels like at the end of The Wild Bride, the dark fairy tale come to life on Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda stage. This is, without question, the great treat of the holiday theater season (though it's not really for kids younger than about 13, what with the mutilations, the sex and the devilish nature of the show).
Here comes the Bride indeed – in the most unexpectedly charming and poignant fashion you can imagine. Director/adaptor Emma Rice and Kneehigh, the quirky troupe from Cornwall, England, are blessedly back in the Bay Area, where they previously triumphed with their dynamic adaptation of Noel Coward's Brief Encounter at American Conservatory Theater a couple seasons back. May they keep coming back. And back.