theater – Repeat Performances

October 12, 2019

The otherworldly beauty of Sankai Juku

The extraordinary butoh dance company Sankai Juku performed this weekend at Zellerbach Hall as part of Cal Performance’s World Stage series. The company was formed in 1975 by Ushio Amagatsu, who is choreographer, designer and director. Like much of Japanese dance and theater, the 90-minute performance moved at a slower pace than American and European dance. But it is precisely this slow and sustained movement deeply attached to the ground and gravity that creates the performance’s...

Categories: dance, theater

September 25, 2019

Hats off to A.C.T.’s “Top Girls”

What makes Caryl Churchill’s plays great is that they explain nothing. They present complex and even painful situations as matters of fact to be looked at and examined without the interference of an obvious agenda on the part of the playwright. Interpretation is left to the director, actors and audience. Exemplary of this approach to theater is Top Girls, which opened at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater this past weekend. The play premiered in London in 1982, in the midst of Margaret...

Categories: theater

September 15, 2019

A warm and colorful “Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Marin Shakespeare Company performed Shakespeare’s delightful comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream this past Sunday. The show is the third and last of their summer festival in what is now their 30th year of producing and performing plays, the majority of which were written by Will Shakespeare. The company is at a turning point made possible by an anonymous donor who offered $2,000,000 as the lead gift in a capital campaign in 2015. Since then the company, under the continuing...

Categories: theater

August 4, 2019

Laugh-a-lot at “Spamalot” in Marin

“Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” cries the grimy man in tatters. He and his mates are dragging a cart full of bodies through plague-ridden England. Moments before, a line of monks passed by, each hitting himself in the forehead with a huge book. A burly man dumps a body in front of the cart. “But I’m not dead!” protests the heap of thin body parts. “You will be soon enough!” is the reply. And in protest, the thin body parts reassemble themself, leap up and begin to...

Categories: opera, theater

June 29, 2019

Measuring the mettle of men in Marin

It’s rare to see Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure presented as a laugh-out-loud comedy. But Director Robert Currier of Marin Shakespeare Company has done just that, turning this dark and complex drama into a commentary on today’s charged issues of sexual misbehavior and the inequities of the prison system. Currier and his cast deftly handled the darkness with a light and comic touch. The result was a delight. The play spends equal time on both mores and injustice. Originally...

Categories: theater

June 5, 2019

Rampaging rhinos at A.C.T.

It’s not necessary to decode Ionesco’s 1959 play, Rhinoceros, the playwright himself thoroughly explained its meaning. Hearkening back to his youth in Romania, he informed the public via interview of his university life, when one by one his colleagues abandoned their opposition to fascism and became part of the Iron Guard, the ultra nationalist, anti-Semitic paramilitary group founded in 1927 that rose to power in Romania at the beginning of World War II. Ionesco’s meaning is...

Categories: theater