“I think a lot of what I watch or read ends up in the work of Kronos, one way or another,” says David Harrington, acclaimed violinist and founder of the San Francisco-based music ensemble Kronos Quartet. “And as it so happens,” Harrington adds, “I tend to watch a lot of documentaries.” For example, he recently…
“I know what it’s like to have a dream,” says actor-educator Jim Jarrett, of Sonoma. “I know what it’s like to struggle in pursuit of that dream – and I know what it’s like to start late in doing it.” Vincent van Gogh didn’t start painting until he was 27, points out Jarrett, who began…
“It’s challenging to play in the pit for three different musicals in a given week,” admits Sonoma-based drummer Quinten Cohen. “But it’s very rewarding.” A longtime company member and orchestra performer with the annual Summer Repertory Theater Company in Santa Rosa, Cohen says that he looks forward to his yearly participation in the program. It’s…
“Relationships matter,” the Rev. Jane Spahr once preached. “Relationships matter because relationships are what really change the world.” In the early 1980s, Spahr helped form a pair of San Rafael-based organizations dedicated to changing the world through building relationships between people in need and the wider community. Whether or not Spahr and the people she…
“As both a political ad guy, and a general ad guy,” says Sonoma’s Bob Gardner, “I always lean toward trying to do the kind of commercial that will draw people in, and make them think a little bit.” Adds Gardner: “As opposed to trying to hit them over the head with a sledgehammer.” A seasoned…
In West Side Story—Sondheim, Bernstein and Arthur Laurents’ beloved ’50s-era street-gang homage to Romeo and Juliet—two teenage New Yorkers meet by chance at a tense interracial community dance, and their forbidden love sets in motion a series of events hopeful and tragic. For this all-important first-act meet-up to work, the audience must feel the electrifying, fateful connection…
“The Nice Guys,” writer-director Shane Black’s darkly entertaining R-rated homage to action movies of the 1970s, is not particularly nice. But it’s a whole lot nicer than many of the films that inspired it. Low-rent L.A. private eye Holland March (Ryan Gosling, displaying admirable physical comedy chops) is a drunk and a screw-up, but he…
“Don’t get me started.” Jasson Minadakis, one quickly notices, uses that phrase a lot. “Don’t get me started.” For the record, when it comes to talking about theater—especially the kind of expectation-defying, definition-challenging, artistically fearless theater Marin Theatre Company (MTC) has become known for over the 10 years that he has served as its artistic…
Slavery was still legal in England in 1833, when American actor Ira Aldridge became the first black man to appear on stage in London. Following the death of famed actor Edmund Kean, Aldridge was called upon to play the lead in Shakespeare’s Othello, alongside white actors at Keane’s Theater Royal, in Covent Garden. With Abolition just…
Few filmmaking tricks are harder to pull off than that of fusing honest, political outrage with solid, crowd-pleasing entertainment. Whenever significant political questions are tucked into a mainstream movie – as in the recent “Avengers” and Captain America films – they are usually so dumbed down and simplified they are unlikely to cause anyone to…
