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Theater
A Bit of Schadenfreude You Can Live With
Fifty years ago, playwrights like Harold Pinter were amassing scathing reviews and death threats, but now the thespian trademark of self-conscious menace and making spectators squirm in their seats is just par for the course. After all, it’s inarguable -- awash as we are in pop culture froth and the constantly impending threat of censorship -- that schadenfreude and shock value are the unspoken standards of modern theater. More
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Theater
Help Me Do the Right Thing
This tasty and sometimes disturbing work explores the transformative and healing powers of sexuality. In it we witness sweet, prim Midwestern girl Peggy, masterfully played by Jennifer Claire, steadily unraveling as her inner erotic fantasy life begins to merge with her drab, staid real-world life. It’s by turns funny, scary, gripping, and sexy, with overtones of Sex Lies and Videotape, Michel Foucault, and BDSM master/slave interrelationships. More
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Theater
A Ripping Social Satire of Love and Marriage
W. Somerset Maugham’s plays concentrated on social commentary and the conventions of marriage, and in his clever satire, “The Circle”, Maugham presents his audience with a circuitous dilemma -- is marriage for practical purposes, or is marriage for love and passion? The drama here is in two generations of upper-crust marriages where characters are confronted with similar impulses, with wives who seek to abandon stability for a shot at romance. More
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Theater
And the Tummler Rolls Along
Fred Raker’s solo show is an exorcism, a thinly veiled vehicle for nonstop impressions, a tribute to great comedians, and a poignant parable, all rolled into one. Riffing on the general shape of the Frank Capra holiday classic of similar title, Raker has crafted a tight, multi-layered, clearly autobiographical piece in which he charts his journey through the Show Biz School of Hard Knocks, exploring success and failure, Jewish identity issues, and his own spiritual transformation as an artist. More
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Theater
The Spaces Between Film and Stage
A bare stage with a projection screen, the image of two men walking amidst a dusty, black and white cinematic landscape, the sounds of piano rumblings reminiscent of the music from the silent film era. This is where Berkeley Rep’s production of “All Wear Bowlers” opens, with Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle, both the authors and stars of this production, exploring the permeations between film and stage, performer and audience, vaudeville and postmodern theater. More
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Theater
Lustaholics Anonymous
Hi, I’m Clifton and I’m a cochino. You know, the holidays are always difficult, and this last week has been especially hard for me -- with so many temptations -- all these little cochinas walking around in Santa Baby outfits, winking at me from every street corner. I’m really on the edge, you know? But after I shared at the last meeting, I was thinking, you know, I’m making progress on my first step. I mean, I am powerless over my cochinismo, but I’m struggling -- do I just give in, or do I try to stay on the straight and narrow way? More
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Theater
Fundamentally Free
René Descartes, in his Principles of Philosophy (1644) states “We experience within ourselves a certain freedom, which enables us always to abstain from believing anything which is not obviously certain and established.” For him, doubt was man’s fundamental freedom. John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” brings the full weight of the existential dilemma of the existence of God in every line, every gesture, every scene. More
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Theater
O Glorious Cheesy Triangle!
"Il Barbiere di Siviglia", Rossini’s best known work, is a facile and silly confection, and according to Opera America, the fifth most performed opera in North America. Like Mozart, to whom he was sometimes compared, Rossini was a prolific and lighting-quick producer of music. He wrote this opera in just thirteen days -- the zippy, spontaneous delivery is evident in the work. More
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Theater
Pick a Number
“Mentalists” have been around for centuries, and there is a rich tradition of performance in the genre, with figures like Uri Geller, The Amazing Kreskin, and Derren Brown among the prominent practitioners. Rasputin was even seen as a practitioner of mentalism, which emphasizes the ability to exert uncanny influence upon others with non-verbal cues. Marc Salem is in this camp, but true to form, prefers the term “purveyor of mental games.” More
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Theater
A Scion of Good, Old-Fashioned Decadence
Chicago-based Silent Theatre Company understands the appeal of classic celluloid, which they ape to sublime ends in their piece "Lulu", an adaptation of German playwright Frank Wedekind’s 1894 Lulu cycle, comprising "Earth Spirit" and "Pandora’s Box", but bearing more of a resemblance to G.W. Pabst’s 1928 film revision starring über-vamp Louise Brooks. More
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