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San Francisco
(Bay Area)
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Bay Area Theater Review: THE GREAT WAVE (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)
A TINY DROP Given the storyline, it’s remarkable how the urgency is more than diluted in The Great Wave, Francis Turnly’s play about a teenage Japanese girl who disappears one night when she is presumably washed out to sea by an enormous wave. Sadly, Mr. Turnly compounds his story with hackneyed dialogue, American vernacular (“my…
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Theater Review: TOP GIRLS (A.C.T. in San Francisco)
YOU’RE THE TOP, GIRLS For the most part, Joyce, a working class Englishwoman in Ipswich is not a sympathetic or likeable person: She is annoyed by her teenage daughter Angie (who admittedly is belligerent and daft), and begrudging toward her sister, Marlene, whom she views as a ball-busting, career-driven, selfish, soulless abandoner (not that there…
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Opera Review: ROMEO AND JULIET {ROMÉO ET JULIETTE} (San Francisco Opera)
VERONA: FAIR; ROMEO AND JULIET: KILLER First performed in its inaugural season of 1923, San Francisco Opera begins its 97th season with a production new to SFO of Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette (Romeo and Juliet), an adaptation of Shakespeare’s timeless tale. One of the French composer’s finest works, and an excellent example of French…
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San Francisco Music Preview: DANIIL TRIFONOV & MTT: RACHMANINOFF 4 (San Francisco Symphony)
RACH ON Daniil Trifonov is continuing his journey to honor and emulate his hero, the great Rachmaninov, by joining the San Francisco Symphony this weekend to perform the Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, a golden opportunity since it’s rarely played often in concert halls. Preceding The Fourth, Michael Tilson Thomas — in his…
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Theater Preview: CAROLINE, OR CHANGE (Ray of Light at Victoria Theatre in San Francisco)
CHANGE IS NOW We hear that that the only thing constant is change, yet we struggle against change, we fight against change, and some are even willing to succumb to the unyielding stress of determined apathy rather than change. We live in a world that must change the way it consumes and change the way…
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Cabaret Preview: ONE NIGHT ONLY CABARET WITH THE CAST OF HAMILTON (Marines’ Memorial Theatre in San Francisco)
YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION In 1994, the groundbreaking decision was made to cast openly gay, HIV-positive Cuban-American Pedro Zamora as part of MTV’s The Real World: San Francisco. Zamora’s time in the Real World house on Lombard Street brought a face to the AIDS crisis. The darkly handsome, funny, surprising, and in-your-face activist…
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Theater Preview: HOT MIKADO (42nd Street Moon in San Francisco)
HOT, HOT, HOT I’m guessing most of you have not seen David H. Bell’s rousing Hot Mikado, a swing-era adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s beloved 1885 operetta, The Mikado. It may be the funniest toe-tapping musical comedy you’ve never heard of. This tour de force comic satire and dazzlingly spirited dance spectacular is a musical…
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Theater Review: PASSION (Custom Made Theatre Company in San Francisco)
A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim’s Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such. It is the jewel in the Sondheim canon, exquisite to some, an oddity to others, and it contains some of…
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San Francisco Theater Review: CABARET (SF Playhouse)
GO TELL MAMA: CABARET‘S A HIT Cabaret was and remains one of the boldest and most innovative experiments in the history of musical theater, a ravishing work that has neither lost its power nor its pertinence no matter what one does with it, and it is gratifying to report that the new production at the…
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Theater Review: HAIRSPRAY (Bay Area Musicals)
EVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN’T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musicals production of Hairspray is one of those shows. Everyone involved has set out to provide a lively showcase for local talent and for the friends…
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Theater Review: OEDIPUS EL REY (Magic Theatre in San Francisco)
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE ‘HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro’s Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfaro’s heart bleeds with compassion for his characters, that his writing is rich and often dazzling in its use of language and in its…
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Theater Review: THE BALD SOPRANO (Cutting Ball Theater in San Francisco)
ACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you’ve ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first moment right through the absolutely nutty ending just before it begins — horrors! — all over again, it doesn’t take more than five minutes into…
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Bay Area Theater Review: KISS MY AZTEC! (Berkeley Repertory Theatre)
ONE LAST KISS… Inspired lunacy? Or strained silliness? Irreverent? Or just plain vulgar? A broad range of Latin musical genres? Or music that’s just plain derivative? See Kiss My Aztec! at Berkeley Rep and make your choice. What Tony Taccone and John Leguizamo have done is to take a little known piece of Aztec history…
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Theater Review: RHINOCEROS (A.C.T. in San Francisco)
WHAT AN ABSURD WORLD The first scene in the A.C.T. revival of Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, directed by Frank Galati with razor-sharp clarity and breakneck swiftness as a comic duel between two life-long friends, the fuzzy minded alcoholic Bérenger and the elegant know-it-all Jean, deliciously played by the casually woeful David Breitbarth and the…
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Theater Review: THE JUNGLE (Curran Theatre in San Francisco)
IT’S A JUNGLE IN HERE From 2015 to 2016, The Jungle was a makeshift camp in a landfill site in Calais, France, the port city where the Channel Tunnel to the UK begins. Inhabited by refugees from nations normally unfriendly to one another — Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, and others — they put…
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Dance Review: THE LITTLE MERMAID (San Francisco Ballet at the War Memorial Opera House)
A BIG LITTLE John Neumeier’s multi-cultural fantastical rendition of Han’s Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid has returned in a beautiful production at the San Francisco Ballet in the War Memorial Opera House. Created in 2005 for the Royal Danish Ballet and revised in Hamburg in 2007, Neumeier includes Andersen as the “Poet” guiding and lamenting…
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San Francisco Theater Review: THE GREAT LEAP (A.C.T.)
A SMALL STEP There is a stillness in B.D. Wong that is the embodiment of grace. In his exquisitely calibrated portrayal of Wen Chang, a Chinese party loyalist, Wong walks a delicate line between the elegance of one of the ballet world’s premier danseurs and a well-crafted and well-oiled machine. In his stride, he is…
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S.F. Theater Review: FIORELLO (42nd Street Moon)
MAYOR DREAMS COME TRUE SOME OTHER TIME The 42nd Street Moon production of Fiorello is just fine, if you allow for the looseness of staging, the clumsy choreography, and the overall sensation that it is primarily a high school production played by adults (this is not a criticism of high school productions, since I’ve seen…
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Theater Review: STEVE (New Conservatory Theatre Center in San Francisco)
THE BOYS IN THE BLAND “Every day a little death/In the parlor, in the bed.” Thus spake Stephen Sondheim in his waltz time operetta A Little Night Music. And it is not totally frivolous to start a conversation about Mark Gerrard’s interestingly fresh oddball comedy, Steve, with a musical comedy reference since it is about…
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Theater Review: HER PORTMANTEAU (A.C.T.’s Strand Theater)
CARRYING BAGGAGE Although it is written with an almost childlike simplicity, Mfoniso Udofia’s Her Portmanteau tells a wrenching tale of the profound effect that separation creates when a woman who has left her family behind in Nigeria to start a new family in America has to face again her daughter, who has now come to…
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