San Diego

NOSTALGIA LOADED — AND EYE SAFETY ENSURED The 1983 film A Christmas Story may not have been universally crowned a “classic” when it premiered, its near-universal popularity and nostalgic look back at Christmas in 1940 have long since earned it that status. San Diego Musical Theatre brings back the musical version in which we meet…

HER MIND, OUR MEMORY Kenneth Lonergan’s family fissures hit hard in Backyard Renaissance’s intimate staging What an incredibly robust month November has been for smaller theaters in San Diego: the fun of To My Girls at Diversionary; a gloriously intense one-woman performance in Beauty’s Daughter at OnWord; a delicious character study in Master Class at…

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…

BEAUTY GETS MORE THAN SKIN DEEP Beauty’s Daughter is a one-woman play by Dael Orlandersmith that centers on Diane, a young Black woman growing up in East Harlem, as she navigates a world marked by violence, beauty, trauma, and resilience. Marti Gobel portrays six different characters consecutively before returning to the first one, Diane. No…

CALLOUS CALLAS CASTS A CAPTIVATING CHARACTER Maria Callas (1923-1977) was unquestionably one of the finest opera singers of the twentieth century. The mix of her great talent with her being difficult, petulant, and opinionated only served to heighten people’s interest in her and boost her fame, as did her very public love life, including a…

A DELIGHTFUL LITTLE SCRIPT—FOR SHAW! Best known for Pygmalion (which was adapted into My Fair Lady), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw challenged people’s views on social issues, including class structure. In his Arms and the Man, there’s a clear message of celebrating the letting go of putting on airs, as well as a hard look at…

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…

SMALL IS EPIC In his exceptional how-to book Storyworthy, author and storyteller Matthew Dicks advises us to stop recounting tales that few can relate to — like the time you climbed Mt. Everest — and instead share stories that help others see themselves in similar moments. That’s how a story connects. Robert Montano does exactly…

HUZZAH AND HO-HUM The curtain speech at Huzzah! — which opened Thursday at The Old Globe — comes with bassoon and tambourine: silence thy phones, feed not ye actors. This bit of business tells you everything. The evening ahead will be enthusiastic, self-aware, and content to play within modest boundaries. The cast Nell Benjamin and…

GLITTER, GHOSTS AND GOLDEN-AGE GLAMOUR: DESPITE THE SCRIPT, CYGNET’S FOLLIES MAKES A BIG SPLASH AT THE JOAN Cygnet Theatre staked the debut of their new theater complex “The Joan” on a fairly solid bet: Stephen Sondheim. Given he is one of the great darlings of the theatre world, a musical with a score by Sondheim is a smart…

BESIDE MYSELF WITH PRAISE When the lights came up at the end of Act I of Beside Myself, my immediate reaction was, “No!” I was so invested in the proceedings of this stupendous world premiere that waiting fifteen minutes to see what happens next seemed criminal. Such is the payoff of Paul Slade Smith’s writing…

THEATRICAL ARRHYTHMIA La Jolla Playhouse has always been fairly adventurous in its programming, but its latest premiere chooses a subject that feels less like theatrical fodder than a medical case study. A human heart travels from the body of a dead teenager to a waiting recipient, and along the way the audience is asked to…

HOW TO SUCCEED IN HISTORY WITHOUT REALLY TELLING IT Meet Lettice Douffet (Bobbi Randall), an eccentric tour guide at Fustian House, a drab Tudor mansion. Burdened with delivering its painfully dull history to visitors, she finds the plain facts intolerable. Instead, Lettice gradually begins to embellish wildly, weaving dramatic tales of intrigue, passion, and bloodshed…