San Diego

LONG MAY THIS PRODUCTION REIGN Since its first production opened in Balboa Park in 1935, the Old Globe Theatre has built a national reputation for ambitious and stimulating productions, but this summer the company’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s history trilogy Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III has raised the bar to what must surely…

DON’T BOTHER FOR DINNER The North Coast Repertory Theater is offering two hours of exceedingly lightweight summer theater in the French farce Don’t Dress for Dinner. And being a typical French farce, the play revels almost exclusively in ostentatious slapstick with an erotic edge. My large Sunday matinee audience seemed to love every unsubtle moment…

ALICE IN STUNNED-ERLAND Lewis Carroll sure never saw this version coming. His 1865 novel Alice In Wonderland, probably best known from the 1951 Disney animated film, has been reinterpreted time and again. This rocking musical version (with music by Duncan Sheik, lyrics by Steven Slater, and book by Slater and Jessie Nelson) reworks the original…

MACROBATS The one challenge in writing this review is my atypical, completely-blank notepad taken home from the theatre. But that’s with good reason.   Duel Reality — which opened last night — makes it challenging to decide just what to look at on stage at times, let alone dare to look away for something as mundane…

NOT LARSON’S BIGGIE, BUT IT PAID THE “RENT” One of the great heartbreaks of theater history is that Jonathan Larson, the author and composer of the rock opera Rent, his modern telling of Puccini’s La Bohème, died suddenly at 35 of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthday and…

MOMMIE McDEAREST Irish playwright Martin McDonagh quickly makes it abundantly clear that dysfunctional mother/daughter relationships are not just the stuff of Hollywood. In the tiny town of Leenane in Western Ireland in the 1990s, Maureen is in a situation many families can relate to: she is the only daughter out of three willing to be…

IN THIS CASE, NINE IS A PERFECT SCORE In Nine, the musical adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 ½  now playing at Coronado Playhouse, Guido Contini (William Henry Schneider), an internationally famous film director of the 1960s, is turning forty and is at an impasse in several ways. After three critically and financially successful films, his…

THIS AMERICAN FELT LIKE AN IDIOT UNTIL READING A SYNOPSIS When MTV hit the airwaves, a young generation stopped dead in their tracks and watched hours and hours of endless videos. Frequently, they made no sense because, in most cases, the video had far less to do with the words of the song and more…

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…

STIRRING UP A RECIPE FOR FAMILY REVELATIONS It may seem like a lifetime ago, but can you remember way back to April of 2021?   Washing canned goods with gloves on?   Masking to accept a package?   Envying 80 year olds because they had first crack at a vaccine?   It’s staggering, as we’re fully caught up in…

WAS BLONDE, BUT NOW I SEE! It’s easy to say that everyone wants to be taken seriously, but for Elle (Johnisa Breault) that notion has never really crossed her mind. She’s happy, perky, pretty, wealthy, loves her UCLA sorority friends and has the perfect boyfriend in Warner (Eli Wood). Life is perfect, so why would…

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…

A SWEET OFF-THE-GRID MUSICAL With the unexpectedly huge American response to Netflix’s Virgin River, there seems to be a great longing to see what life might be like in a tiny, forested community instead of the hustle and bustle of semi-anonymous city life. From It’s a Wonderful Life to The Andy Griffith Show to Northern…