San Diego

FASCIST LOGIC CAUSES US TO LOOK HARD IN THE MIRROR When we think of all the Nazi monsters, Adolf Hitler’s name reigns supreme. But it’s only a short step down the ladder to be revolted by men like Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Göring. Many such key figures committed suicide before they could stand…

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…

BEDAZZLED WAR AND PEACE SIZZLES ON STAGE Let’s face it: If you haven’t read Leo Tolstoy’s 1869 novel War and Peace by now (with its 1400-plus pages), you probably aren’t ever going to. Fortunately for you, Dave Malloy read it and apparently loved the heck out of it. So much so, in fact, that he…

THE LOVE CHILD OF LAURA INGALLS AND ANNE OF GREEN GABLES In this novel-turned-musical, it’s 1899 and the world, even in rural Texas, is changing. Just not nearly fast enough for Calpurnia Tate (Aubriella Navarro), who is “age 11-3/4, practically 12!”, as she mentions (and sings) quite often. The Cast Calpurnia isn’t quite a tom-boy,…

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…

YOU’LL BE DANCING IN THE SHEETS ALL OVER AGAIN Sitting in a movie theater, in 1984, we teens were spellbound by the original film version of Footloose — and not because it was an amazing story or full of brilliant acting performances (spoiler alert: it wasn’t). Recall that MTV had begun to mesmerize us less…

OUR PUPPET, WHO ART IN HELL, HALLOWED BE THY BLAME When a newly widowed mom tries to lead three teens in a wholesome, Lutheran, extra-curricular church class, tasked with creating a Christian puppet show, what could go wrong? Thankfully for us, plenty, in Robert Askins’ gripping, darkly-comic drama which premiered Off-Broadway in 2011. Adam Daniel…

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…

ALWAYS A BRIDESMAID:SEVER THE BRIDE In 2000, screenwriter Alan Ball won an Oscar for his hit screenplay American Beauty, followed by his powerfully edgy HBO series Six Feet Under and the Emmy-winning series True Blood. To reach this apex, his storytelling career had to start somewhere and that initiation, in 1993, was the dramedy play…

A FASCINATING JOURNEY INTO THE AUTISTIC MIND Mark Haddon’s novel is a first-person tale shared by the autistic main character: 15-year-old Christopher Boone, who lives in a small lower-class town in southwestern England. Playwright Simon Stephens (Heisenberg) frames Haddon’s tale as a play-within-a-play: Christopher (an astounding Daniel Patrick Russell) has journaled his experiences in a…

BAKING UP SOMETHING GOOD AT WILDSONG Come on, Wildsong. You’re only two seasons old, in a tiny theater, have mostly young company players, and are on a ridiculously small budget. There’s no way that adds up to even considering doing one of Stephen Sondheim’s toughest musicals, Sweeney Todd, let alone doing it this brilliantly. Sondheim’s…

SEEING FIDDLER AGAIN AND AGAIN IS A GREAT TRADITION It’s no surprise that this 1964 triumph ’” with an irresistible book by Joseph Stein and unimprovable songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick ’” keeps surprising us with our own humanity. It’s 1905 in a small Russian village called Anatevka, and a fiddler plays a…

SANDWICHING GOOD STORYTELLING BETWEEN TWO SLICES OF COMEDY Remember Linda Lavin’s old TV sit-com Alice? And her co-waitresses: the sassy Flo (“Kiss my grits!”) and the ditzy Vera at the truck stop diner? And the owner, cranky-but-loveable Mel, giving them hell through the kitchen passthrough as he cooked everything up? Well, flip that around so…

Learning another language is like becoming another person. — Haruki Murakami Years ago, I ran a teambuilding class using improv games for an I.T. group.   Despite the diversity of heritage and appearances in the group, there was only one person in the group who was an immigrant. “Min” had a thick Chinese accent and, despite…

BILLIE’S LIFE WASN’T NO HOLIDAY The title actually says a lot. When a star as bright as Billie Holiday, the sultry jazz singer whose career lasted from 1929 to 1958, is performing at a bar and grill in her hometown of Philadelphia, late in her career, something is clearly amiss. Billie explains that she loves…