November 2019 – Repeat Performances

November 23, 2019

Nothing up our sleeves: difference and illusion at The Marsh

David Hirata begins “The Box Without A Bottom,” his performance monologue currently at The Marsh in Berkeley, with a story about taking his daughter to eat sushi for the first time. During their meal he needs to explain to his daughter that she is half-Japanese. She replies, “You mean I’m half Japanese and half Regular?” It’s a telling moment for Hirata, and one that many people from various ethnic and racial groups feel while living in this hodge-podge of American demographics...

Categories: theater

November 15, 2019

The sweetness of home: San Francisco Opera’s “Hansel and Gretel”

Grimm’s folk tales are indeed grim. Often functioning to terrify children, they frequently pit innocence against malevolence. We don’t seem to be able to free ourselves of them and our childhoods remain full of girls in red hoods chased by wolves and starving children abandoned by their parents in dark woods. For what keeps the stories alive and seductive is that the innocents often defeat the evil forces that threaten them. Hansel and Gretel, the 1893 opera by Engelbert...

Categories: opera

November 7, 2019

The Cirque is in town!

The holidays approach and with them comes that wonder of spectacle and glamour, the Cirque du Soleil. The Big Top tent, which at 62 feet tall and 167 feet in diameter, weighs in as ginormous and is housed with the village that houses its performers and technicians at San Francisco’s Oracle Park lot. Once you step inside the Big Top you enter a world far from the sawdust and rings of Barnum & Bailey’s circus. Huge blue and green tendrils reach toward the sky somewhere beyond the...

Categories: theater