September 24, 2015
Joe Goode’s “The Poetics of Space”
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September 2015
September 18, 2015
“Sweeney Todd” on the stage of San Francisco Opera
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September 16, 2015
San Francisco Opera presents “Luisa Miller”
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September 11, 2015
ACT opens its season with a sizzling new play
A proud old man stands his ground at ACT
ACT’s Geary Street stage bursts with life in the company's 49th season opener, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s vivid and profane Between Riverside and Crazy. The life the play reveals belongs to New York City cops and criminals, who intersect explosively in a rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive.
Inside the apartment’s shabby walls everybody claims to tell it like it is, but...
Berkeley Rep stages a bright new musical
Amelie sings! Amelie rules!
The new musical at Berkeley Rep, Amelie, is a glorious triumph, so I feel safe making a confession. When the movie it’s based on came out in 2001, I hated it. I saw it at a critic’s preview in San Francisco, where pretty much everyone adored it.
“This is the sort of French movie that gives French movies a bad name,” I said.
I can confess this for another reason: Berkeley...
September 5, 2015
Remembering Robert Commanday, an Interview with Erwin Frech, Jr.
Of cherry blossoms and nonsense songs…
Robert Commanday, one of the Bay Area’s more beloved music critics, passed away last Thursday, Sept. 3. A font of wisdom and wit, he was a reviewer for the SF Chronicle for three decades and the founder of San Francisco Classical Voice, an influential online magazine.
You can find tributes to him in several obituaries, but it seems appropriate to add one story that I find extraordinary. In the...