‘Hold still and sip the pain.” It’s a brief, swift line, uttered kindly but fiercely by the wise, wary slave Azucar (Cathleen Riddley), combing the hair of the impulsive, 13-year-old Zuri (Dezi Soley). Azucar’s simple sentence is a strong early example of how playwright Star Finch will be weaving words together in the stunning world…
The poster art for Marin Theatre Company’s current production of the high-school comedy “Peerless” is mischievously ingenious. It features an illustration: a pair of smiling school girls, a silhouetted rat and crow, and a cartoonish x-eyed corpse – all so cutely and crisply drawn one might assume that – rats, crows and corpses aside –…
“You want to tell me about black people?” In director Carl Jordan’s sensitive, doggedly humane staging of David Mamet’s 2009 drama Race – running through March 26 at Left Edge Theater – that confrontational line comes early, as a brilliant black lawyer, Henry (Dorian Lockett, funny, furious, and absolutely superb) faces off against a potential client, the cocky…
You know the story: A young woman, a bit too obsessed with who’s cool and who’s not, sets out to make the world a better place by fixing up her friends with the perfect boyfriends and girlfriends. She gets it all wrong. Feelings are hurt. She’s especially mistaken in regards to who she belongs with…
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…
‘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…
Ideas don’t get much bigger than the nature of democracy or the theory of relativity. But two local theater companies are successfully wrestling those brain-busting subjects into highly enjoyable, stage-sized entertainments. 1776, the seldom-produced 1968 musical by Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards (Spreckels Theatre Company), combines an enormous cast, clever projections and elaborate costumes to…
