Funny and chilling, it's Humans' nature
There's something so comforting and so terrifying about family. That dichotomy is captured perfectly in Stephen Karam's The Humans, the Tony Award-winning drama that is now touring the country. The superb production is at the Orpheum Theatre as part of the SHN season.
It's a rare enough occurrence these days for a play to go on tour, but to have one this entertaining and unsettling is even more reason for celebration (side note: there are almost four times as many producers listed as actors). Karam's play does something extraordinary by trying to be ultra-ordinary.
Purple reigns at SHN's Orpheum
When I originally reviewed the musical version of The Color Purple based on Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and the Steven Spielberg's 1985 movie version, I felt the production was too Broadway slick and the score was too bland. The only thing that worked – and indeed the thing that saved that October 2007 touring production – was Walker's story and her powerful characters. (Read the review here.)
That was only 11 years ago, but The Color Purple is back.
Parks finds poetry, drama in epic Father
There's some epic myth-making happening on the stage of American Conservatory Theater's Father Comes Home from the Wars (Parts 1, 2 & 3). Playwright Suzan-Lori Parks – one of those great American playwrights whose mere name should always inspire you to check out her work – nods in the direction of other great epics, most notably The Odyssey, but also, as she has said, The Oresteia and The Mahabharata as she tells the story of a slave who reluctantly follows his master into the Civil War.
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).
Ga-ga for Go-Go's in giddy Head Over Heels
How thrilling to find the songs of the Go-Go's fashioned into a fizzy new jukebox musical, Head Over Heels with the inventive concept of folding the punky-poppy '80s tunes folded into a (greatly) adapted version of Sir Philip Sidney's late 16th-century Arcadia. You've got song and text separated by more than four centuries, so it's a mash-up of sensibilities with lots of room for cheeky humor and the exploding of gender norms.
Vietgone plays with language, history at ACT
Bold, irreverent, and laugh-out-loud funny, Qui Nguyen's Vietgone, at American Conservatory Theater's Strand Theater, can also be frustratingly scattershot and amateurish.
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.
Floating on air in rock musical Weightless
In this version of the story, adapted by Dan Moses and Kate Kilbane, the horrible things aren't quite as godawful as they are in Ovid (the cannibalism, for instance, is absent), but they're still pretty bad, and they (surprise surprise) fit right into our collective #MeToo moment.
Shavian wit still dwells in Aurora's Houses
George Bernard Shaw's Widowers' Houses last played Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company more than 20 years ago, and though the theater company has come up on the world (bigger, spiffier theater), the satirical world of Shaw's play still reflects badly on our own lack of evolution where greed, poverty and decency are concerned.
Party on, Pinter! ACT throws a Birthday bash
There's a lot to love about American Conservatory Theater's The Birthday Party, a funny, slightly freaky Harold Pinter. The cast is uniformly strong, director Carey Perloff (essaying her last directorial effort as ACT's artistic director) deftly balances the unease and the humor. But for me, the joy, the electrical charge, the bright light of the production is ...
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.
Love doth evade Marin's Shakespeare in Love
The Bay Area finally gets to see Shakespeare in Love on stage thanks to Marin Theatre Company, and while the cast boats some of the Bay Area's best actors – Stacy Ross, Lance Gardner, Megan Trout, Mark Anderson Phillips, L. Peter Callender – the production flails under the direction of Jasson Minadakis.
Galaxy of emotions surround Bright Star at the Curran
Steve Martin and Edie Brickell's Bright Star is a beautiful musical, especially if you have a penchant for bluegrass music and florid stories with twists, turns and not-so-surprising surprises.
It feels like a quintessentially American musical in several ways, the first being that glorious, banjo-heavy bluegrass, which brings to life a story that stretches from the 1920s to the 1940s in North Carolina.
Shotgun's Black Rider dances with the devil
Thirteen years ago – such an appropriate number of years – American Conservatory Theater made some sort of deal with the devil to get The Black Rider onto the stage of the Geary Theater. Now Berkeley's Shotgun Players revive this decidedly adult fairy tale under the guidance of director Mark Jackson, and the results are heartily satisfying.
The knockout punch of Aurora's Royale
There's something wonderfully vital and theatrical about Marco Ramirez's The Royale now at
Disney's Aladdin flies high at the Orpheum
There is no question in my mind, that of all Disney's animated film to Broadway adaptations, Aladdin is the most thoroughly successful. For The Lion King stage adaptation, Julie Taymor offered eye-popping spectacle and stagecraft in service to a flimsy story and even flimsier characters. Beauty and the Beast, Disney’s first Broadway venture, was fun and dazzling but only a ride vehicle away from being a theme park attraction. The less said about the misguided Tarzan and missed opportunities of The Little Mermaid the better.
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?
SF Playhouse's Barbecue sizzles
Robert O'Hara is one of those playwright/directors who, when his name is attached to a project in any way, you pay attention. He's smart, funny and has a keen eye for theatrical disruption. His Insurrection: Holding History may have played at American Conservatory Theater almost 20 years ago, but it remains one of the wildest, most wonderful things I've seen from that company.
O'Hara – the playwright – is back in town with Barbecue, the first show in San Francisco Playhouse's 15th season, and here's what's on the grill: ...
Crowded Fire tells a futuristic Tale of Autumn
Who are the good guys/bad guys? What truth lies behind smokescreens and lies? And when good guys resort to bad behavior, doesn't that make them bad guys, thus leaving no good guys and obscured truth?
San Francisco playwright Christoper Chen's world-premiere A Tale of Autumn, a commission from Crowded Fire Theater, is all about good gone bad and bad gone worse. Imagine Google, Oprah and the U.S. Government wrestling with notions of altruism and greed and you get some idea of what Chen is up to here.