San Diego

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…

DUBLIN YOUR PLEASURE WITH GOOD DRAMA AND COMEDY With a somewhat-forgettable title and a rather vague plot summary on the website, one walks into Outside Mullingar not quite sure what they are going to see. By the end of the first scene of this 95-minute one-act play, one could still be wondering: “Is this going…

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…

KNOWING WHICH IS WITCH The word “crucible” has two very different meanings. One is a pot in which substances are heated to high temperatures. Another is a situation in which people are severely tested. Which definition is The Crucible based on? A case could easily be made for either and likely both for playwright Arthur…

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…

MATHEMATICAL PLOT ADDS UP TO SOLID DRAMA David Auburn is brave. Writing and marketing a play that, on the surface, centers on math sounds like a recipe for disaster. In a world where most adults pray that the tip at a restaurant will appear pre-calculated for them at the check’s bottom, selling a play about…

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…

OVER THE MOON In much of our lives, we get to choose the people we surround ourselves with. Shy of that, we’re at least usually around those with whom we share some common interest, such as taste in movies or having kids on the same soccer team. And then there are those locations where we…