October 2018 – Repeat Performances

October 27, 2018

Facing the music of our lives

The Center Repertory Company presents Mark St. Germain’s comedy, Dancing Lessons, through November 17 at the Margaret Lesher Theater in Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts. The play premiered in Massachusetts in 2014. The 90-minute romantic comedy tells the story of two people who are intensely challenged by their lives and how they struggle to overcome the isolation of those lives by interacting with each other. Senga (Sharon Rietkerk) is a dancer who has had an accident,...

Categories: theater

October 19, 2018

A crisp and fresh “Women Laughing Alone with Salad”

Three women – one thin, one voluptuous, one middle-aged – are sitting on a park bench, eating enormous bowls of salad. Soon they are taken with giggles, then howls of laughter. Hmmm. How fun is it to eat salad? Shotgun Players’ production of Women Laughing Alone with Salad zeros in on this question. And the answers are engaging, hilarious and very familiar. [caption id="attachment_2089" align="aligncenter" width="720"]...

Categories: theater

October 16, 2018

Love from the hinterlands: San Francisco Opera’s “Arabella”

Arabella, lovely Arabella, positioned to buy her family out of debt through marrying off her beauty to the highest bidder, but searching wistfully for Mr. Right. Can the two inharmonious approaches to love resolve into one happy ending? In Richard Strauss’ opera they do indeed. And in the San Francisco Opera production that opened on Tuesday they resolve, like Tobias Hoheisel’s production design, from black and white into varieties of gray. Nonetheless suggesting, somehow, that an...

Categories: opera

October 13, 2018

The mind is a voice-over in “Fairview”

Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Fairview opened at Berkeley Rep this past week. A co-commission of Berkeley Rep and Soho Rep, the play was developed in Berkeley Reps’ The Ground Floor program and premiered at Soho Rep in New York this past June. The play pulls out a number of theatrical forms and practices but melds them into a madcap and very illuminating look at black-and-white relations in this, the United States of America. Part of the difficulty of overturning the biased and dismal...

Categories: theater

October 11, 2018

“ECHO / riding the rapids” in a flurry of symbols

“Doesn’t he look like he’s trying to get into a body?” asks Sara Shelton Mann, director of ECHO / riding the rapids, leaving her seat in the audience to join one of her principal dancers on stage. The dancers’ responses, after she resumes her seated anonymity, range from graceful to violent, ultimately crystallizing in a symbolic reality where every decision reflects a previous one. Their performance on October 11 at ODC Theater built a world through solo and paired movement...

Categories: dance

October 10, 2018

Sonic Harvest celebrates this October 14 in Berkeley

On October 14, Sonic Harvest will host its 18th annual concert of music, poetry, original compositions, and more. The concert, From Troubador to Tango, brings together the premiere of guest composer D’Arcy Reynolds’ Tangria, songs by Ann Callaway, the premiere of a work by Peter Josheff for spoken voice and piano as well as his violin solo September. It will also include a song cycle by Allen Shearer and Claudia Stevens’ solo performance referencing...

Categories: music