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Insider Outsider Man

Insider Outsider Man

The North Coast Rep took a huge risk, on paper at least. Tom Dudzick’s Over the Tavern has roles for four children, ranging from 8 to 16. The safe choice: find teenage-ish actors (i.e., twentysomething), dress ...

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Try to Remember

Try to Remember

The first time I saw The Fantasticks, way back when, I took my fiancée. We adored the chipper first act, in which a “tender and callow” boy and girl fall in a love beyond metaphor. ...

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Mind and Hand Together

Mind and Hand Together

How did Shakespeare do it? How did the author of King Lear, Henry IV, Part One, and The Winter’s Tale compose two plays a year for almost two decades? A comparative look at the writing ...

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Unexploited

Unexploited

On May 15, 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace had toned down his vein-bulging, racist views and began to rise in the opinion polls. He ... More Post a comment

Greed Machine

Greed Machine

‘We invent ourselves,” Walter Franz tells his brother Vic, “to wipe out what we know.” The title of Arthur Miller’s 1968 drama, The Price, points ... More Post a comment

Character from Costume

Character from Costume

A fitting session with costume designer Jennifer Brawn Gittings begins to look a lot like Christmas. She hauls racks of clothes and boxes of shoes ... More Post a comment

Lightning in Chaos

Lightning in Chaos

In the sleek, two-story lobby of the Potiker Theater, a soldier saluted, quarter-turned to the east, shoveled imaginary dirt, quarter-turned to the south, peeled imaginary ... More Post a comment

A Smidge of the Harpy

A Smidge of the Harpy

"In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in ... More Post a comment

Various Villains

Various Villains

Marc Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock had one of the most famous premieres in theater history. The Federal Theatre Project commissioned, then dumped, the ... More Post a comment

All at a Loss

All at a Loss

Call your play Rabbit Hole, and you conjure images of a tardy white hare shouting “I’m late!” with a ticking clock tucked under one arm. ... More Post a comment

Four, and Oneness

Four, and Oneness

Sound designers usually draw raves for obvious effects: street traffic, flocks of chirping birds, hammer-the-walls thunder. Their background scores also set mood and period. But ... More Post a comment

Daily Humiliations

Daily Humiliations

The times they have a-change-ed. Working, Studs Terkel’s remarkable collection of interviews, was published in 1974. Subtitled “People Talk About What They Do All Day ... More Comment (1)

Genocidal Days

Genocidal Days

The Brecht police will probably snipe at the San Diego Rep’s Threepenny Opera: how it fails to achieve this or that aspect of his “Epic ... More Post a comment

Photographer of Ectoplasmic Auras

Photographer of Ectoplasmic Auras

Henry Louis Grin (1847–1921) was a jack of many trades: a footman for the famous actress Fanny Kemble, a Swiss banker’s servant, an inventor, and ... More Comment (1)

A Rebel's Revolution

A Rebel's Revolution

Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death has such a contemporary feel, it’s almost impossible to believe he wrote the play — hailed by many as “the best ... More Post a comment

All Around You

All Around You

WILL NO ONE MOURN THE CARTER? The Cassius Carter Centre Stage is no more. The Old Globe demolished its intimate theater-in-the-round to make way for ... More Comments (3)

Help Too Much

Help Too Much

Diane lost her husband, a “brilliant” CEO, in Africa. Now the socialite wants to sell the house, land a job (her first), and sever all ... More Post a comment

When People Lost Their Ideals

When People Lost Their Ideals

In the theater, said Marlon Brando, “You can have a universal experience of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that it’s ... More Post a comment

Sidney's Son

Sidney's Son

Flan and Ouisa Kittridge verge on having it all: two children at Harvard, one at Groton; a grand Fifth Avenue apartment near Jackie O’s; a ... More Post a comment

To the Marrow

To the Marrow

When American Buffalo premiered on Broadway in 1977, critics had to devise new terms to praise David Mamet’s craft. It wasn’t simply realistic, they said; ... More Comments (2)

Perishable

Perishable

This column’s late. I got bit but good by that bug going around. “Re-view” a year — would that were possible, literally re-see favorite shows ... More Post a comment

Quaint Past

Quaint Past

Each holiday season, Lamb’s Players presents an annual Christmas show at its resident theater and a three-hour extravaganza, An American Christmas, at the Hotel del ... More Post a comment

Woe Plus Meanness

Woe Plus Meanness

Hooo-boy… Christmas is just around the corner, yet the residents of Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas — even counting “greater” Tuna — are so ... More Post a comment

Anything for a Laugh

Anything for a Laugh

Talk of Broadway surrounds The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea, an African retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fable. If the buzz refers to the ... More Post a comment

It'll Get Done

It'll Get Done

A gutted theater’s a depressing sight. October 25, 2008: painters apply a foundation coat to the Old Town Theatre’s interior walls. A heat wave forced ... More Post a comment

He May Be Mad

He May Be Mad

Tom Stoppard called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “the most expendable people of all time.” Minor courtiers in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, they barely exist beyond their Renaissance finery ... More Post a comment

Bread and Games

Bread and Games

When the Roman emperor Nero was born in AD 37, an astrologer declared he would have a “naturally cruel heart” and would become a “public ... More Post a comment

Forget Gold

Forget Gold

Water and Power, the title of Richard Montoya’s “stage noir” drama, sums up Southern California history in three words. Forget gold, railroads, or waves upon ... More Post a comment

Freak Show

Freak Show

When it opened on Broadway in 1933, Jack Kirkland’s subhuman dramatization of the Erskine Caldwell novel Tobacco Road received mixed to negative reviews. Even though ... More Post a comment

Blood and Fire and War

Blood and Fire and War

PROGRAM NOTES: Moxie Theatre invited me to dramaturge its latest production. My notes for the program grew beyond its confines, so I decided to present ... More Comments (3)

Italian Finery

Italian Finery

At a time when the light at the end of the tunnel must be an oncoming train, Lamb’s Players Theatre is staging Adam Guettel and ... More Comment (1)

Juiced

Juiced

From 1986 to 1988, the Oakland Athletics had back-to-back-to-back Rookies of the Year: Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, and Walt Weiss. Under ex-lawyer Tony La Russa’s ... More Post a comment

Three Damned Characters

Three Damned Characters

Picture hell. For those who live in Pacific Beach and work nine-to-five jobs, hell arrives every Thursday afternoon. College students schedule their classes Monday through ... More Post a comment

You Are What You Look Like

You Are What You Look Like

On Victoria Petrovich’s set for The Good Body at the Rep, shiny panels reflect clouds and pale blue skies. Projected slides take us from America ... More Post a comment

Sharecropper Country

Sharecropper Country

When rock ’n’ roll first hit the scene, hipsters swore that “things’s gonna get REAL GONE for a change.” Although it felt born full grown ... More Post a comment

A Drooling Thersites

A Drooling Thersites

Shakespeare’s range was enormous. He could charm with Twelfth Night, enchant with Winter’s Tale, go deep with Hamlet and Lear. But what if only one ... More Post a comment

Blame-Thrower

Blame-Thrower

When Spring Awakening won eight Tony Awards for 2007, including Best Musical, word around the Big Apple went that it would never tour, that it ... More Post a comment

He Grabs the Gold

He Grabs the Gold

I’ve always been fascinated by sources of artistic inspiration. What triggered Hamlet, say, or The Iliad? What alchemy transformed ambient noise into Don Giovanni? Was ... More Comments (2)

Bad-Boy Visionary

Bad-Boy Visionary

If you judged only by externals, you'd swear that Jonathan Waxman, protagonist of Sight Unseen, has it all. Waxman's a "bad-boy visionary" artist who had ... More Post a comment

Puttin' on the Blitz

Puttin' on the Blitz

‘Every show starts with a stack of papers,” says Duane Daniels, founder of the Fritz Theatre, “words on a page, from the script to production ... More Comment (1)

Slanted Script

Slanted Script

The curtain rises at the Old Globe and vwa-lah! We’re in the majestic living room of a Victorian mansion. A bay-window seat, with nine-foot windows, ... More Post a comment

Ancient Grudge

Ancient Grudge

The Old Globe Theatre’s staging three of Shakespeare’s plays about love: star-crossed Romeo and Juliet, gender-crossed All’s Well That Ends Well (in which the woman ... More Post a comment

Bitter Past

Bitter Past

Shakespeare’s always up to something. Even in plays that feel written in haste, like All’s Well That Ends Well, the Bard’s twisting conventions and turning ... More Post a comment

Material Glitter

Material Glitter

In today’s terminology, you could say that Joe Bonaparte has bipolar gifts. His hands are as adept in the boxing ring, clobbering contenders, as they ... More Post a comment

Junk City

Junk City

Along with dents on every fifth car, which people can’t afford to repair, and a beer at Petco costing more than the hourly minimum wage, ... More Post a comment

Cubicle Gal

Cubicle Gal

We watch a woman just home from work. Her eyes are so blank, it’s hard to tell if she’s glad to be back in her ... More Post a comment

Jagged Conversation

Jagged Conversation

Caryl Churchill’s play A Number unfolds like a hall of slowly warping mirrors. The play opens with Salter, in his early 60s, talking to his ... More Post a comment

The World Disappears

The World Disappears

What is it about acting that can grab a person’s full attention — and often hold it for a lifetime? Recently I got to dramaturge ... More Post a comment

One Down, One Up

One Down, One Up

The La Jolla Playhouse’s 33 Variations, about Ludwig van Beethoven’s obsession with a paltry theme by Diabelli, concluded its run in early May. San Diego ... More Post a comment

Misplaced Menagerie

Misplaced Menagerie

The Old Globe Theatre’s “Classics Up Close” series presents some of the great works of American theater on the small Cassius Carter Centre Stage. The ... More Post a comment

33 Variations

33 Variations

Music is time-bound. It must move forward or cease to be. A few hundred years from now, most likely music will leave linear progression and ... More Post a comment

Theater of Real Life

Theater of Real Life

The “Father of Modern Drama” wasn’t Ibsen, or August Strindberg. He was Andre Antoine (1858…1943), a clerk for the Paris Gas Company and an amateur ... More Comment (1)

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Win The Unborn on DVD!

Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman) hated her mother for leaving her as a child. But when inexplicable things start to happen, ... More