theater – Repeat Performances

February 2, 2020

Emailing compassion in “Tiny Beautiful Things”

Tops among those things the internet has changed is how we communicate with each other. Social media, blogs, even venerable papers with long histories of print have made their way to the digital realm. Users form a public with more democratic potential, and the public is no longer local. Even more, we can tell our stories and share our ideas and feelings without editorial constraints of time, space and propriety. We tell our stories as long as we want and about whatever we want and to whoever...

Categories: theater

February 1, 2020

The delightfully daft “Princess Ida”

Founded in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, Girton College was Britain’s first residential college for women offering a college degree. Its opening was followed two years later by Newnham College, and at the University of Oxford, Somerville College in 1879 and Lady Margaret Hall in 1878. The University of London opened its first women’s college in 1882. Women’s education was on the move in Victorian England. On January 5, 1884, the latest Gilbert and Sullivan comic...

Categories: opera, theater

January 29, 2020

“Wakey Wakey” a bit sleepy sleepy

Up until its last minutes Wakey Wakey is a monologue. A man in a wheelchair sits in the middle of a stage fitted out to look like an institutional setting, could be a school, could be an empty Elks club, could be a hospital. And he talks to us, the audience. Or rather, he meanders and we are his witnesses, his silent conversationalists. It’s understandable why A.C.T. might have been drawn to stage Will Eno’s Wakey Wakey. It’s about a man who is dying and in those...

Categories: theater

December 7, 2019

Digging into winter: San Francisco Playhouse’s “Groundhog Day”

It’s hard to imagine the darkly comic film with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day, as a musical, even though musicals these days tend often deal with the bleaker side of human nature, at their darkest delving into criminality and murder. The play was chosen, according to San Francisco Playhouse’s Artistic Director Bill English, because the company was seeking “a show that will work well for the holidays.” One that was not A Christmas Carol, the most iconic theatrical piece...

Categories: theater

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 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