It is generally accepted that William Shakespeare—aka the Immortal Bard, aka the Upstart Crow, aka the Sweet Swan of Avon, aka the greatest playwright the world has ever known—wrote 37 plays during his lifetime, which ended exactly 400 years ago last April 23. He possibly wrote more. Possibly a lot more. Possibly even a play…
“William Butler Yeats was an astonishingly complex individual,” says harpist and storyteller Patrick Ball, describing the legendary Irish poet and playwright — and sometime politician and mystic philosopher — whose mysterious, atmospheric poetry has solidly placed its creator within the ranks of the greatest literary figures of the 20th Century. “He was brilliant of course,…
For years now, a number of notable cable television stations and movie revival houses have marked St. Patrick’s Day by playing the John Wayne-Maureen O’Hara classic “The Quiet Man,” among other shamrock-flavored films. It makes sense. The 65-year-old film does still hold up, dramatically – for its charming small town setting and magnificent fist-fight-brawl at…
“Slavery is a horror story,” says San Francisco playwright Star Finch. “Slavery is something that, when you are African-American, and also a parent, you have to tell your children about at some point. And that’s horrifying. That’s a very painful thing. It’s painful in general, telling your children about the horrors of the world.…
There’s a line that comes about halfway through Edward Albee’s classic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Unlike so much of the rest of Albee’s brutal and brilliant drama, it’s not a line full of anger or recrimination, or witty humor, or caustic observation. As such, it stands out like a whisper in a rainstorm.…
Among William Shakespeare’s many lofty histories – for hundreds of years the Bard’s best attended plays (till the 1800s came and his tragedies took their place in theatergoers’ hearts) – Henry IV, parts one and two have lost much of the love Elizabethans felt for them. If they are performed today at all, it is…
There’s a theory known as ‘Biophilia,’ says writer-director-filmmaker Marina Michelson. “It was first put out there in the 1980s, and it basically suggests that human beings possess this innate drive, this deep need or tendency, to want to connect with nature in really intense, intimate ways.” It was during a wedding two-and-a-half years ago, held…
‘We have sinned!” exclaims a desperately guilty character early on in A Little Night Music, adding, “And it was a complete failure!” “In our show, that line is worth the ticket price,” proclaims Craig Miller, director of 6th Street Playhouse’s production of the beloved Stephen Sondheim musical. “It’s my favorite moment in the show,” Miller says.…
Well, it’s spring, and the annual Oregon Shakespeare Festival has kicked off its 2017 season with four new shows – out of an eventual total of eleven —the majority of them playing for the next nine months in Ashland, Oregon. The First Four include a frisky stage adaptation of the film ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ and…
It snowed last night in Ashland, Oregon, where the temperature outside ultimately dropped to a low of 20 degrees. Meanwhile, on stage inside the Angus Bowmer Theater, the temperatures and blood pressures were increasingly high, as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival kicked off its 2017 season with a vigorous, high-energy, decidedly weird staging of William Shakespeare’s…
North Bay Stage and Screen 