San Diego City Council meeting minutes, May 22
Liz Swain 4:24 p.m., May 24
Back to profile
Stories by Jeff Smith
Superior Donuts at the Rep
After the world premiere of his epic A Lie of the Mind in 1985, Sam Shepard told an interviewer that no matter what he wrote next, the critics would rip it to shreds. Instead of ...
There's Gold in Them Thar Cuyamacas
The Life of a MinerIn August of 1870, when Louis Redman went to pick wild grapes along a creek over the mountain from Julian, he happened upon the American Dream. Something glinted in the rust-colored ...
A Spin on Fortune's Wheel: The Life of a Mine
When he was ten miles from Placerville, in 1851, gold fever struck J.D. Borthwick hard. Five men slung heavy pickaxes by the roadside. They looked like “so many grave diggers,” but much more determined. Borthwick, ...
Unforgettable San Diego: Did They Go Gentle Into That New Town? Part Two
Albert Seeley ran the U.S. Mail stage line from San Diego to Yuma and Los Angeles. In 1868, Seeley bought the Bandini residence in Old Town. When Alonzo Horton heard Seeley wanted to convert it ...
Cygnet Theatre's Tragedy of the Commons and a Musical Emma at the Globe
Dakin and Macy Adams live on the southern slope of Mount Soledad, about a mile up from Bird Rock. Their terrace overlooks P.B., Mission Bay, and Point Loma. Pan left and there’s SeaWorld and, deeper ...
Do Not Go Gentle Into That New Town, Part One
San Diego may be unique in American history as the only city that changed locations. In 1871, the county seat moved three-and-a-half miles south, from Old to New Town. The change, literally, tore the city ...
Death of a Salesman at the Old Globe
God created time, an old adage holds, to keep everything from happening at once. If so, then Willy Loman is running out of time. Events from now and yesterday inundate him, often with competing claims. ...
Nicky Silver's Dark Farce
Andrew, a gay character in Nicky Silver’s Maiden’s Prayer, says he looks for three things in a man: the size of his Manhattan apartment, if he has cable, and external beauty. Then he pauses, sensing ...
Where Words Fail
In one sense the best, in most others the worst of times. Throughout the county the level of performance has never been higher. You can expect competent acting in most local theaters. Two examples: Scripps ...
Good at Being Bad
Satan and Moloch just got laid off. Times are so economically splattered, even Lucifer’s minions are getting pink-slipped. Okay, sure, devil-work — tempting sinners and terrorizing saints — wears a mite thin after a millennium ...
Ruined at the La Jolla Playhouse
If plays are boxing matches with an audience, they all throw punches, some solid, some glancing, some airy nothing. Plays that linger counterpunch. These land on your way out the door, in the parking lot, ...
Red Lights, Slow Time: Storyville at the Lyceum
‘What is our town coming to?” asks Mama Cecelyn. “We got whores, pimps, drug addicts, murderers, and liars in Storyville. But now we even have horn thieves amongst us. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.” She just put ...
The Crucible at Moxie Theatre
’It were sport, Uncle,” Abigail Williams tells the Reverend Parris three pages into The Crucible. Arthur Miller took the quotation from the testimony of Mary Warren, a servant of John Proctor. Accused of witchcraft in ...
The American Stage
"Each of us who loves the theater,” writes John Lithgow, “has a secret list of the great shows we never got to see.” His may be. Mine’s not. I would love to have seen the ...
Eerie Twists in Gee's Bend
Amid Athol Fugard’s Nobel Prize–worthy opus are plays about individuals on the margin of the Big Picture. In Blood Knot, Master Harold and the Boys, Sizwe Banzai Is Dead, and others, Fugard shows the cruel ...
The Glory Man at Lamb's Players Theatre
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau says doing good can have selfish motives. Goodness, he writes, “must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he ...
The Man at La Jolla Playhouse
In one of his gleefully apocalyptic pronouncements, William S. Burroughs said we should regard consciousness as a “failed experiment.” The Man in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), which Burroughs committed to memory, says consciousness is ...
Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin
An alert to my colleagues in the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle: I hereby nominate Rob McClure for a Craig Noel Award, Lead Performance in a Musical, Male. His Charlie Chaplin in Limelight, at the ...
Miss Saigon at the Moonlight and Jack Goes Boating at the Ion
The program for Moonlight’s Miss Saigon shows the famous photo that inspired the musical. Taken in 1975 at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam, it’s a frantic crowd scene. In the foreground, a ...
Life's Like a Dream in North Coast Rep's Becky's New Car
If you don’t blink, Stephen Dietz’s Becky’s New Car makes for an entertaining evening. Blink, however, or pause for reflection, and how and why things happen would perplex even the most gullible among us. Maybe ...
miXtape Cues '80s Music and Memories at the Horton Grand Theatre
Back when, a dear friend used to give mix tapes as gifts: collections of favorite songs on audio cassettes. She insisted that the sequence was as important as the songs. Like a baseball lineup, it ...
Control Freak
Calling your trilogy of plays The Norman Conquests makes it sound like a medieval tryptich or Bayeux Tapestry illustrating the events of 1066: William the Conqueror storming across Hastings, lance lowered, the banner of destiny ...
Tommy Guns and Classy Tunes
San Diegans hear a show’s “Broadway bound” so much the tag has lost pizzazz. The Old Globe’s recent musicals — The First Wives’ Club, Sammy, and The Whisper House — came decked with Great White ...
Love’s Errant Eyes
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 148 complains: “O me, what eyes hath love put in my head,/ Which have no correspondence with true sight!/ Or if they have, where is my judgment fled,/ That censures falsely what they ...
Death Alley
The Butterfield Stage line between Warner’s Ranch and Oak Grove was a narrow trail, dusty in summer, soggy in winter, rutted the year round. On its weekly treks, the stage always stopped at Deadman’s Hole, ...
I Just Saw a Frightful Monster
When he recalled his early years in San Diego, Herbert Hensley loved to tell about the time Jimmie Dillar saw the devil. In June 1890, as he explored the treeless mesa where Balboa Park stands ...
Another Love
At the theater critics’ annual Craig Noel Awards ceremony, recipients thank fellow artists and friends for support. But just what does that support entail? What, for example, is it like to be married to an ...
Royal Madness
The Old Globe is staging two plays about monarchs gone mad: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Alan Bennett’s Madness of George III. Lear’s is self-inflicted. A seemingly simple test of love has a “butterfly effect.” Families ...
There Go the Lovers
In the great romantic legend of early San Diego, Josefa Carrillo falls in love with Henry Delano Fitch, a Massachusetts seaman. But Governor José Maria Echeandia forbids their marriage. So late one night, the star-crossed ...
Icon or Abusive Swine?
The males in Shakespeare’s original audience for Taming of the Shrew probably saw Petruchio as a Hercules and Katherine Minola as his 13th labor, far graver than swabbing down the Augean stables or slaying the ...
Here Come the Trappers
“What nameless tortures and miseries Americans suffer in foreign climes from despots,” complained the mountain man James Ohio Pattie. “They hate the victims of their oppression, as judging their hearts by their own.” One of ...
Words Like Arrows
Adrian Noble has written a valuable book: How to Do Shakespeare. In it, the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company teaches a master class on the subject. He sums up the objective behind ...
He Lived in Interesting Times
“You are a devil!” the Mexican governor of California shouted at his American prisoner, a shaggy-haired fur trapper named James Ohio Pattie. Then, with the eye of “an enraged beast” and the “growl of a ...
Mutual Obligations
Rachel Hauck’s set for Surf Report, at the La Jolla Playhouse, tells much of the story by itself. A sleek unit structure, upper walkway and open lower area, serves as a house, an office, even ...
The Giant Eye Rolls Uphill
“The disk is a whale,” Howard Blakeslee, science editor at Associated Press, wrote to George Ellery Hale in 1934. “Every detail is on a scale so much larger than anything heretofore attempted.” “And if the ...
Odyssey of the Giant Eye
Jack Belyea’s truck company became world famous for hauling gargantuan objects. In 1930, he and his brothers transported a 110-foot, 115-ton kiln 26 miles, then lowered it down a 20-percent grade with winches. They moved ...
Back to the '30s
Noel Coward’s elegant, daffy Private Lives begins where most comedies end. Two pairs of honeymooners take in the scenery at Deauville, France’s classiest seaside resort. While an orchestra plays below, they prepare for a fashionably ...
From Outside-In
Say you’re Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie, which almost didn’t make it to New York, was an empyrean success in 1945. It ran for 561 performances and vaulted Williams to the heights. It also raised ...
Palomar Pioneers: Of Travail and Tragedy
Rattler ManJoseph Beresford, son of a British Lord, fell in love with the gardener’s daughter. His father, whose lineage went back to James I, gave him an ultimatum: marry beneath your rank and lose your ...
Doctor in the House?
Playwright Matthew Lopez discovered a surprising parallel in U.S. history. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee signed the documents of surrender at the Appomattox Court House; on the 12th, the Army of Northern ...
Palomar Pioneers: The Water Bearer
In 1904, young Elise Roberts and her family summered on Palomar Mountain. They left their Long Beach home in a roofed wagon, half packed with clothes and bedding, the other half filled with hay for ...
Advance, Retreat
The Meters, a New Orleans funk band, asked in song, “Now that we found love, what’re we gonna do with it?” Terence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune offers contrasting answers. Maybe ...
She's the Best Man
Sometimes when she talks, a cigarette dangles from the right side of her mouth, the tip bobbing up and down — à la George C. Scott — with each word. At other times she leans ...
Craig Stories, Act 2
Craig Noel died in his home on April third. He was 94. Friends remember the Father of San Diego Theater. THE PERSONJack O’Brien, artistic director emeritus, Old Globe Theatre. In the mid- to late ’60s, ...
Craig Stories, Act 1
Craig Noel died in his home on April third. He was 94. Friends remember the Father of San Diego Theater. THE PERSONConrad Susa, composer. Craig was my deep soul brother. I first met him at ...
Fear the Light
The “ghosts” in Henrik Ibsen’s drama don’t go bump in the night. But they’re just as haunting. Only Mrs. Alving sees them. For 19 years she fought to keep her public image from collapsing. Pressures ...
No Dragons
Cygnet Theatre is fast becoming Sondheim Central. Their Little Night Music captivated audiences, they are stage reading/singing Passion on April 12 and 13, and their current Sweeney Todd threatens to blow out the doors at ...
But I Am No One
How do you prove you aren’t an “interesting human being”? Since he broke up with his girlfriend, Khaled’s lived in a dinky, book-clogged studio where he starts but can’t finish short stories. He’s got writer’s ...
Boing Boing Clunk
Boeing-Boeing at the Old Globe: the title sounds like someone bouncing on a trampoline, which actually describes the French farce, if the bouncers are Boeing jets taking off and landing at Orly Airport and deplaning ...
Fairy Tale, with Knives
If you get the chance, do see Moonlight Stage Productions’ wonderful Ring Round the Moon. It’s got a terrific cast, a handsome look, humor, brainteasers, and panache — and closes March 21. Asked what he ...
