San Diego

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,…

THE MAGNOLIAS MAY BE STEELY, BUT THEY STILL SMELL PRETTY SWEET For over 80 years, Lamplighters Community Theatre has been providing an important role in San Diego’s theatre scene: creating a space for non-professional actors to come together to do quality work at affordable ticket prices. Part of their sweet spot is their knack for…

A GREAT 70s TRIBUTE HAS VINYL-LY ARRIVED Normally, calling a show predictable isn’t a compliment. But when I heard that director Kerry Meads and musical director Vanda Eggington were once again teaming up for a musical tribute, The 70s! The Golden Age Of The Album, I predicted a joyous celebration of feel-good music, performed by…

STILL PLENTY TO DESIRE A Streetcar Named Desire was one of the greatest hits for playwright Tennessee Williams. Born in 1911, he didn’t have any major successes until The Glass Menagerie premiered on Broadway in 1945. While that certainly put him on the theatrical map, it was Elia Kazan’s 1947 staging of Streetcar that truly…

THE ODYSSEY, IN ASHES AND UPHOLSTERY The chair will not move. That is how we begin. In Anna Ziegler‘s The Janeiad, now in a quietly astonishing production at the Old Globe, which produced Ziegler’s The Last Match in 2016, a woman sits in a green armchair and does not get up. Not because of laziness….

OKLAHOMA! RIDES AGAIN– THIS TIME WITH DEPTH IN THE SADDLE When gay playwright Lynn Riggs wrote the rather dark Green Grow the Lilacs, his eighth play, and saw it produced in 1931, it’s likely he never dreamed it would be turned into an upbeat musical that would still be hitting stages 94 years later. Thirteen…

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…

UNNECESSARY, PERHAPS, BUT DELICIOUS! Wikipedia defines farce as “a comedy that seeks to entertain an audience through situations that are highly exaggerated, extravagant, ridiculous, absurd, and improbable.” Director Robert May and his cast at Scripps Ranch Theatre make sure that is exactly what we’re getting from playwright Paul Slade Smith’s enchanting Unnecessary Farce. Danny Lovelle…

CURRY UP TO THE OLD GLOBE FOR A TASTE OF FAMILY SERVED HOT The Old Globe is presenting the world premiere of House of India, a new play by Deepak Kumar. The show unfolds in the Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theater, an intimate space offering a theater-in-the-round experience—an element that’s pivotal to the success…

FORGET THE USUAL – MOXIE IS SERVING A TENDER STORY WITH A SIDE OF TRUTH Not every good story needs to take you around the world in eighty days or off to a magical land with wizards; sometimes, a simple, well-written interaction between regular people whom one might meet at, say, a store, can be…

COMFORTABLE HOMEY FOLK SHARE A SWEET STORY Book and music creators Steve Martin (yes, THAT Steve Martin) and Edie Brickell heard a true story from 1902 and became somewhat obsessed with it. They brainstormed a purely fictional account of what could have led up to that moment (most of Act I), the actual moment itself…