Just add water: Metamorphoses returns to Berkeley Rep
Nearly 20 years later, Metamorphoses returns to Berkeley Rep, this time to the Peet's Theatre. The show remains stunning – still gorgeous, still moving, still an example of theater at its sumptuous best. There are moments that are stunning, thrilling, funny and breathtaking. After Berkeley Rep, the show ended up on Broadway, where Zimmerman won a Tony.
Aside from dancing, Berkeley Rep Square is far from paradise
There are actually two competing musicals in Paradise Square: A New Musical now having its world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. One of them is much better than the other.
Incredibly ambitious and overstuffed, Paradise Square wants to create excitement about a particular moment in American history with a wonderfully diverse cast and a score that blends show music, traditional music and contemporary sounds (sound familiar? can't blame producers for not wanting to throw away their shot). But this show, many years in the making, is still fuzzy, unfocused and only intermittently interesting.
Slammed door opens in Doll's House, Part 2 at Berkeley Rep
Playwright Lucas Hnath imagines what happened to Nora after she stepped through that door in the audaciously titled A Doll's House, Part 2, which opens the Berkeley Repertory Theatre season in a razor-sharp, vital and funny production directed by Les Waters.
Hymns of praise for Kushner's Angels at Berkeley Rep
Angels in America is back in the Bay Area, this time at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where it is directed by Tony Taccone, who, with Oskar Eustis helped bring this play into the world when it premiered at their Eureka Theatre in 1991. The play's staggering genius is on full display in Taccone's marvelous production, as is Kushner's prescience (Russia, Republican politics, the environmental crisis).
Complex, human look at gun violence in Berkeley Rep Hours
Julia Cho is exactly the kind of playwright I crave. She's thoughtful, adventurous and fanciful in a way that relates directly to reality (she's not a fantasist – her flights mean something in the day to day). She cares about people and their messes, both internal and external. Her Aubergine at Berkeley Repertory Theatre was a revelation (read my review here) and has become one of my favorite plays in recent memory. Her play Office Hour, now at Berkeley Rep's Peet's Theatre, is a thorny piece of work.
2017 theater in review: Reflections on a powerful year
If you're a theater fan, 2017 was a very good year. If you're an American, depending on your point of view, 2017 was a terrifying year. Quite often, it seemed, the theatrical stage and the national stage were in direct conversation.
Watch on the Rhine at Berkeley Rep
The thing I can't stand about 24-hour cable news networks is that it's 5% news and 95% talking heads spouting opinions and fighting over those opinions.
The thing I loved about Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine (a co-production from Berkeley Repertory Theatre and the Guthrie Theatre) is that the author stakes a claim for action. After a certain point, opinions matter a whole lot less than what you choose to do about whatever opinion you hold.
Imaginary discomfort rules at Berkeley Rep
The first time I head the title for the new play by Daniel Handler, the San Francisco writer behind the popular Lemony Snicket books, I was confused. Imaginary Comforts, or The Story of the Ghost of the Dead Rabbit is the title, and it wasn't the Snickety-y subtitle that perplexed me. It was the notion that comfort could be imaginary. Isn't comfort comforting no matter where it comes from? You can receive comfort from an external source (a parent, a pet, a narcotic) or you can just imagine comfort (memory, dream, hallucination), but as long as you are comforted, job done...at least for a little while, right?
Succumb to temptation and see Ain't Too Proud at Berkeley Rep
When Ain't Too Proud: The Life and Times of The Temptations is in its groove, this world-premiere musical at Berkeley Repertory Theatre is absolutely electrifying. Featuring all or part of 30 songs from the '60s and '70s Motown era, the music alone is alone is enough to make this a must-see theatrical event, but it's clear that this musical biography is going places (namely Broadway).
Facing a fearsome farce in Berkeley Rep'sOctoroon
Artists like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins do that cracked-mirror thing that helps us see where we've been and where we are. None of it is pretty, but his wild play An Octoroon, now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Peet's Theatre grabs you by your painful parts and delivers a surprising, funny and provocative 2 1/2 hours of theater.
To call this simply a play isn't really accurate. An Octoroon is a meta-theatrical fantasia, layers upon layers of art and history, comedy and tragedy, music and melodrama, abrasive satire and inspired clowning.
Musical Monsoon Wedding debuts at Berkeley Rep
Beauty, heart and fun flood the stage of Berkeley Repertory Theatre's world premiere of Monsoon Wedding, the musical adaptation of the 2001 film of the same name. There's clearly a lot of love invested in the making of this show, from the original film's director, Mira Nair, who returns to helm this ambitious stage version, to the ebullient cast.
But is it a good musical? Well, it's a new musical, and it still needs a lot of work.
Division on display in fascinating Roe at Berkeley Rep
There is so much event and detail in Lisa Loomer's Roe – a brisk re-telling of the events and people involved in the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade – that it feels like the world's speediest documentary, something you could only do on a mostly open stage, with actors making their costume quick changes in full view of the audience just so they can keep up. And by attempting to cover the (still unfolding) arc of the case, so much happens that, if it wasn't actually true, you'd never believe it.
Hellishly fun Hand job at Berkeley Rep
Hand to God is just the spiritual exploration we deserve at this point in our sordid human existence. Imagine if the current administration reimagined "Sesame Street" in its own twisted, greedy, egocentric, power-mad image and you might get something like Robert Askins' hit play now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Peet's Theatre.
In a small Texas town, the Lutheran church becomes the epicenter for that most human of showdowns: between good and bad, right and wrong, authority and anarchy, virtue and sin, reality and fantasy.
Glickman prize forJulia Cho's Aubergine
Julia Cho's Aubergine is the winner of the 2016 Glickman Award for the best new play to make its world premiere in the Bay Area. Aubergine was developed at Berkeley Repertory Theatre' Ground Floor, Center for the Creation and Development of New Work. The drama about a terminally ill father and his chef son opened in February at Berkeley Rep and was the first production in the newly refurbished and renamed Peet's Theatre.
Theater Dogs' Best of 2016
The theater event that shook my year and reverberated through it constantly didn't happen on Bay Area stage. Like so many others, I was blown away by Hamilton on Broadway in May and then on repeat and shuffle with the original cast album (and, later in the year, the Hamilton Mix Tape) ever since. Shifting focus back home, theater in the San Francisco Bay Area continues to be a marvel, which is really something given the hostile economic environment arts groups are facing around here.
Madwoman drives a Volvo through 'the change'
If the idea of an NPR-ready take on the challenges and complexity of menopause appeals to you, get yourself to Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Peet's Theatre to see The Madwoman in the Volvo, Sandra Tsing Loh's disarmingly humorous exploration of her midlife mania. If the combo of NPR and menopause raises your hackles, stay away.
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 warning: it can so happen here
Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s It Can’t Happen Here is a nightmare on so many levels, and that’s mostly a good thing in the world-premiere adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel.
This is the right story at the right time, and therein lies the dark heart of this nightmare.
Ruhl peters out in Berkeley Rep's For Peter Pan
Sarah Ruhl is a brilliant writer capable of intellectual heights and emotional depths. Her latest play, For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s Roda Theatre, displays few of those qualities.
Paired with director Les Waters with whom she worked so memorably on Eurydice and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) at Berkeley Rep, Ruhl is working in mysterious ways here.
Grand adventure awaits at Berkeley Rep's Treasure Island
Mary Zimmerman's work is consistently thrilling. Since I first saw Journey to the West at Zellerbach Playhouse, I have looked forward to seeing whatever Zimmerman makes next. Luckily, her relationship with Berkeley Reperoty Theatre is such that she keeps coming back and back, always with something intriguing and, quite often, magnificent. Her swimming pool-set Metamorphoses in 1999 (also performed at Zellerbach Playhouse) remains one of my favorite nights in a theater ever.
Zimmerman's latest offering at Berkeley Rep is a zesty staging of Treasure Island, and it's a blast.