Dan Zeff

A FAMILY POISONED BY THE PAST Joanna McClelland Glass’s intimate drama lands like overhearing a quarrel— and keeps paying off thanks to a first-rate cast. Modern American theater does not lack for theatrical, intense plays. These works typically explore family secrets, betrayal, revenge, trust and mistrust, plot twists and turns, and psychological (and sometimes physical)…

SUN, SAND & SCROOGE, DICKENS IN THE GASLAMP The Old Globe is presenting Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, reshaping the classic short novel into a parody titled Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show. The one-act play provides 80 minutes of jokes, wisecracks, quips, wit, and asides, dispensed at warp speed by a cast of…

RICHARD BERMUDEZ SLAYS TWICE IN SDMT’S JEKYLL & HYDE San Diego Musical Theatre is presenting a gripping revival of the 1997 Broadway musical adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 horror short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, commonly called Jekyll & Hyde. The story follows idealistic London physician Henry Jekyll, who…

DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT SKIPPIN’ PIPPIN Pippin offers musical theater lovers the complete package: brilliant performances, terrific directing, a stimulating book by Roger O. Hirson and a cheeky, sophisticated score by Stephen Schwartz of Wicked fame that got more than one kid addicted to its still-in-print cast album and its soaring ballads and bouncy Broadway…

GO-GO SEE THIS SHOW-SHOW The jukebox musical Head Over Heels is a mash-up of Sir Philip Sidney’s long 1590s poem Arcadia and the songs of the iconic 1980s’ female rock band The Go-Go’s, the all-female American rock band which may be the best women’s group ever assembled. Avenue Q’s Jeff Whitty conceived the show and original…

TWINS, TWISTS, AND A TENDER TOUCH The Old Globe Theatre closes out its summer Shakespeare Festival at the outdoor Lowell Davies Festival Theatre in Balboa Park with a zippy 90-minute one-act production of the Bard’s early farce The Comedy of Errors. Grounded in the farcical confusions and mistaken identities that have made this play such…

NOISES OFF, LAUGHS ON English playwright Michael Frayn debuted his farce Noises Off in 1982, and decades of audiences and reviewers have since happily applauded Frayn’s work as perhaps the funniest as well as the most challenging comedy in the canon of English-language theater. The Old Globe has accepted the Noises Off challenge this summer,…

MURDER MOST TUNEFUL In 2013 a new musical called A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder played San Diego’s Old Globe on its way to a prizewinning run on Broadway. The show is now back for a season-ending run at the North Coast Repertory Theatre, Though perhaps a bit less effective than the 2013 version,…

WELL… The Old Globe Theatre is opening its summer Shakespeare season with the comedy All’s Well That Ends Well, one of the Bard’s least presented (and least admired) works. Completists who wish to add the play to their list of missing Shakespeare shows may want to catch the Old Globe revival while they have a…

NINETY YEARS IN NINETY MINUTES Playwright Noah Haidel compresses 90 years of story into his 90-minute one-act comedy-drama Birthday Candles at North Coast Rep. However, that’s sufficient time to portray Ernestine Ashworth’s five-generation journey through her life in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Matthew Grondin, Emelie O’Hara, Margot White Specifically, we observe Ernestine spending much of her…

Coronado Playhouse is reviving the 2007 musical comedy/murder mystery Curtains through March 30. The show is the final collaboration of the great music theater team of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (the team was working on The Visit when Ebb died in 2004). After original book author Peter Stone died in 2003, Rupert…

A HOUSE DIVIDED, A MUSICAL UNITED La Jolla Playhouse has struck gold with 3 Summers of Lincoln, a bold world premiere musical that dives into the three critical summers—1862, 1863, and 1864—when President Abraham Lincoln fought to hold the Union together amid the country’s deep divisions over slavery. With a book by Joe DiPietro (Memphis,…

LEARNING HOW TO SURVIVE IN THE DESERT Jon Robin Baitz‘s Other Desert Cities—which opened at Cygnet Theatre last weekend—portrays about 24 hours in the upscale home of the Wyeth home in Palm Springs, California, and it’s an emotional stunner. Baitz sets his play over a 24-hour period in 2004. All the action takes place in the…