Dan Zeff

A BRIEF SHINING MOMENT AT NORTH COAST REP Sometimes less can be more in the arts. Consider the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot. The show set a record for the biggest advance sale in Broadway history at the time it opened in 1960. From the creators of My Fair Lady, Camelot seemed to have everything…

FAT HAM HATH POWER TO ASSUME A PLEASING SHAPE American playwright James Ijames has written a funny and thoughtful play based on the Shakespeare tragedy Hamlet. The work carries the unlikely title of Fat Ham and it is playing at the Old Globe Theatre where it is doing sell-out business straight through to its closing…

JUST A SENSE The North Coast Repertory Theatre is currently presenting the world premiere of Sense of Decency, a psychological drama adapted from a 2013 book by American author Jake El-Hai titled The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. The book has been adapted by Jake Broder, who is the play’s co-director with David Ellenstein. The original…

GREAT COMET! Who would have thought that a paltry 70 pages from a mammoth novel by 19th-century Russian author Leo Tolstoy would inspire one of the hits of the recent off-Broadway and Broadway musical scene? Yet here it is at the Cygnet Theatre. This show joins a brilliantly eclectic score and book by an outstanding…

RIDE ON! Annie Cohen Kopchovsky was a late 19th-century young English working-class woman who wanted to upgrade her life. So she tried to earn money and recognition as well as elevating her status as a woman. To that end, in 1894 and 1895, she gained fame as the first woman to ride a bicycle solo…

WINNING ASSIST Big hits can come in small packages. The wonderful production of King James — which opened last night at the Old Globe Theatre — has only two characters and runs only about 1 hour and 45 minutes (plus one intermission), but it has enough humor, drama, and warmth to stoke a play twice…

NORTH COAST REP DOESN’T JUST HEIGHTEN TARTUFFE, IT LEVITATES IT Let’s not bandy words. The North Coast Repertory Theatre revival of Molière‘s comedy Tartuffe is a brilliant success. The production is one of those rare instances in which the greatness of the play unites with a faultless cast and masterful staging to produce a genuinely…

THE HOUR HAS COME The Trinity Theatre in Mission Valley is currently presenting a too-brief revival of A. G. Gurney‘s comedy-drama The Cocktail Hour. The show originally debuted in 1988 at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre and went on to a run in New York City. The Cocktail Hour has been labeled a comedy of…

THE THREADS THAT BREAK The African-American playwright Lynn Nottage sits atop the honor role of American playwrights from the first two decades of the 21st century — she has written a dozen full-length plays, two of which (Sweat  and  Ruined) won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and she wrote the book for the hit MJ The Musical….

A REALLY BIG SHOW The San Diego area does not lack for productions of A Christmas Carol this holiday season. Fortunately, fans of the Charles Dickens classic who would welcome a more hip version of the novel need go no further than Ebenezer Scrooge’s BIG San Diego Christmas Show at The Old Globe. (front) Dan…

GRINCHING FROM EAR TO EAR I attended a recent late afternoon performance of the Old Globe holiday production of Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas with some trepidation. I braced myself for mingling among restless children fidgeting in their seats while their adult keepers periodically shushed them to maintain some semblance of order. Tommy…