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Theater Preview: MOMENTOS MORI (Manual Cinema)
THIS IS THE MOMENTOS I have seen the Chicago-based performance collective Manual Cinema on their home turf twice, and the theatricality is awesome. This endlessly inventive group of artists uses disarmingly simple tools — live music, paper puppets, overhead projectors — to tell transformative stories. Their enchanting works unsettle the boundaries between cinema and theater….
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Theater Review: MELANCHOLY PLAY (Organic Theater Company at The Greenhouse Theater)
PRECIOUS NONSENSE MAKES MELANCHOLY PLAY A FORTRESS OF ARTIFICE If you ever feel “slightly dead,” you may be prey to the temperament of melancholy. Melancholy Play: A Contemporary Farce, a 2002 drama by the prolific and unpredictable Sarah Ruhl, treats the condition with singular intensity, delivering a histrionic polemic on the virtues and perils of…
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Theater Review: INCOGNITO (Son of Semele)
BRAIN CRAMPS One of the brainiest plays since, well, British playwright Nick Payne’s other brainy play, Constellations, Incognito (2014) contains Payne’s usual assortment of short scenes and quantum physics-like, obfuscating construction. But I don’t buy it this time. And not because I don’t get it. (Although I don’t get it.) This is Payne showing off…
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Theater Review: THE WOLVES (Echo Theater Company)
TEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA I’m not really sure if director Alana Dietze could have done anything more with The Wolves, a dramatically inert slice-of-life one act that follows an all-female indoor soccer team over a succession of pre-game warm-ups. Playwright Sarah DeLappe’s Pulitzer-finalist (?!?!?!?!) is awash in the perfect patois of…
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Theater Review: ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST (The Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles)
ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF A PLAY Anarchy is not chaos. The former means “without law” and the latter means “without form.” This is an important distinction to consider in a play that intends to make an argument for anarchy. After a government scandal, a schizoid anarchist poses as certain government officials at a police station in…
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Theater Review: SWEAT (Goodman Theatre)
DIVIDED AND CONQUERED If the American Dream needs an obituary, Lynn Nottage’s 2017 Pulitzer winner is it. If Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty celebrated the power and promise of labor unions, Sweat chronicles a worker’s nightmare. Creating nine palpable characters in crisis, a richly empathetic playwright plunges us into a harrowing tale of deindustrialization in Reading,…
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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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Concert Preview: OSCAR, WITH LOVE (Disney Hall)
OSCAR, WITH LOVE AND BEAUTY AND RESPECT AND: It’s a simple idea that could easily have caused higgledy-piggledy results. In fact, many tribute albums involving various artists contain tracks that are jarringly inconsistent and smack of commercialism. Not so with Oscar, with Love. Kelly Peterson, the widow of Oscar Peterson (1925-2007), personally produced this extraordinary…
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CD Review: RENT (Original Soundtrack of the Live Television Event)
TOO BAD THEY DIDN’T RAISE THE RENT Rent has a romantic history: Jonathan Larson, its author and composer, died suddenly of an aortic aneurysm on Jan. 25, 1996, 10 days before his 36th birthday and the day before the musical’s first preview performance Off-Off-Broadway. Larson’s score is a mix of rock, rap, and gospel, the…
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Theater Review: CATS (National Tour, 2019)
KITTY LITTER If I had my way, the slogan for Cats would be changed from “Now and Forever” to “Not Now, Not Ever.” Even when I saw the show back in the early 80s and again in the early 90s, I simply couldn’t make it through another act and bolted at intermission. After seeing the…
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CD Review: THE MUSIC OF HARRY POTTER AND THE CURSED CHILD (Imogen Heap)
HARRY POTTER AND THE RECYCLED RECORDING ENGINEER Jack Thorne’s immensely popular two-part play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, has taken up residence in London, New York, and Melbourne, and will soon be in San Francisco (Nov. 2019) and Hamburg (2020). Recording artist and engineer extraordinaire Imogen Heap was hired to create a soundtrack for…
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Theater Review: NO, NO, NANETTE (Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater in Claremont)
A YES AND NO NANETTE When the 1925 musical No, No, Nanette was revised and remounted in 1971, it was predicted to be a flop by folks in the Biz, but it was the buzz of the season with nostalgia-seeking audiences who were sick of assassinations and war; they were ready for a delightful, carefree…
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DVD Review: A FRENCH VILLAGE/UN VILLAGE FRANÇAIS (Season 7, Series Finale, on MHz Releasing)
í€ BIENTí”T This brilliant series, set in a fictional south-eastern French village during and just after World War II, gives the patient viewer an extraordinary history from the Nazi invasion from 1940 to 1945: the day-to-day survival mechanisms the populace and police had to endure, and the effects of the Vichy government on turncoat French…
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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: A BRONX TALE (North American Tour)
A BRONX CHEER Unpretentious and unpreaching in its streetwise survival lore, the gangster fable A Bronx Tale is, as the name implies, just one of many small sagas from the lesser borough. Now on tour, this 2016 musical has a book by Chazz Palminteri, based on his semi-autobiographical solo show and the 1993 film directed by…
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DVD Review: INSPECTOR WINTER (MHz Releasing)
WORTH INSPECTING There is something strong to say in favor of MHz’s collection of European dramas and cop shows and Inspector Winter is a quality example. Based on the popular crime novels of í„ke Edwardson, his Swedish detective (Magnus Krepper) is a craggy-faced, 40+ pile of insecurities and power, as depressed as a Scandinavian mid-winter…
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Theater Review: THE CHOIR OF MAN (National Tour)
IN PRAISE OF THE PUB There’s no need for a plot, three-dimensional characters, or conflicts pending resolution — no, not when the setting and its songs sell themselves from the start. That feel-good premise pays off over 80 minutes in The Choir of Man, a British import now playing Chicago’s Broadway Playhouse on its first…
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Los Angeles Theater Review: ESCAPE FROM GODOT (YARD Theater)
WE’RE STILL WAITING You’re watching a play but you have no idea what’s happening. There is no plot, the dialogue is gobbledygook, and characters are filled with despair, yet you are told that this is Theater of the Absurd, one of the milestones in modern drama. Still more maddening is that others around you can’t…
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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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Chicago Theater Review: LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (Mercury Theater Chicago)
THE HORROR…THE HORROR… THE FUN…THE FUN… You can see it as a modern parable of how the neglect that created Skid Row and its plethora of poverty brings its own revenge: A literally bloodthirsty plant gets sensationalized by rapacious promoters and proceeds to eat up the planet. The Bitch Goddess Success is here transmogrified into…
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