San Diego Theater Reviews
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 it something writ large: a sign in the sky, a …
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 an eight-page feature in the New York Times Sunday magazine. …
‘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 demands, and they’re just the tip of one humongous iceberg” …
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, overlooks the Golden Gate Bridge (we’re in San Francisco’s Marina …
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 gets to choose her husband), and double-crossed Merry Wives of …
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 tables. Most of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies begin with an arranged …
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 are playing the violin. His skills are so extreme, in …
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, short theatrical runs are a sign of the times. High …
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 spotless studio apartment or relieved to clock another eight hours. …
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 35-year-old son Bernard. Their conversation’s jagged. Each interrupts the other, …
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 Holy Ghosts for the Sullivan Players. Romulus Linney’s drama concerns …
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 theater’s homage to the maestro continues at the Old Globe, …
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 theater-in-the-round offers an intimate look at plays usually seen many …
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 become vertical as well as horizontal. It may even move …
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 actor. Cercle Gaulois, for whom he played bit parts, performed …
When first produced in 1889, August Strindberg’s “naturalistic tragedy,” Miss Julie, was a shocker: not just for its stark class conflicts, herky-jerky dialogue, and “multiplicity of motives,” but also because the set was what it …