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Theater
A Hero for Our Troubled Times
When Chicano performance trio Culture Clash were approached by Berkeley Repertory Theatre artistic director Tony Taccone to collaborate on a play that would lampoon California's original masked marauder, they were hesitant at first. Zorro, a dreamy Spanish hero conceived in 1919 by Irish-American writer Johnston McCulley, may have fought for the rights of disenfranchised Mexicans in California, but the pulpy melodrama of Douglas Fairbanks-era films is now, in retrospect, gauche and offensive. All the same, Culture Clash, who are known for their biting, irreverent humor and willingness to take contemporary issues to the hilt, couldn't refuse. More
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Theater
Poetry, especially in the slam and spoken word arenas, is changing the way we think about youth and, more importantly, the way youth think about life. The growing popularity of shows like HBO's Def Poetry and the emergence of a hip new faction of performers in the circuit have transformed the scene from an insular cache of one-note artists to a veritable hotbed of creative activity. Aside from a vital connection to hip-hop, urban art and political activism, performance poetry is amplified by the way it enables personal exploration and self-definition among young poets. More
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Theater
Ambitious But Uneven
Playwright Itamar Moses’ “Yellowjackets” is creating quite the stir on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage, which has been impressively thrown into relief by Annie Smart’s vivid, graffiti-spackled set and a towering fence that’s more suggestive of a high-security prison than a high school. The play swirls with mid-90s slang (sending a shiver of recognition down the spines of those of us who braved adolescence during that epoch), urban politics, racially charged turbulence, schoolyard violence and bullying, the Kafkaesque K-12 bureaucracy, and the riotously epic, hormone-driven confusion that characterizes the American teenage experience. More
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Theater
Leave Before Last Call
Let’s face it—the one-person show is typically the refuge of the very interesting or the very narcissistic. And when the person in question happens to be a prime specimen of cinematic and cultural arcana, the scales are almost always tipped in favor of vainglorious tell-alls. “Wishful Drinking” (which might have been more appropriately titled “Carrie Fisher Spills the Beans about Her Life, Willy-Nilly”) is one such example. More
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Theater
A Good Time With The Boys
In Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn’s musical revue “Wilde Boys", the famous decadence of Victorian England surfaces less in its setting and more in the clandestine winks and nudges of its songs, which altogether makes for an entertaining, albeit slightly contained, hour long musical. More
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Theater
Enchantingly Light
There really is no place like home, that magical fantasy realm we often prefer to the real thing. You know the home I'm talking about-the place where incredulity is suspended in favor of schlocky family fare, nostalgia, and the belief that no matter how bad things are, it always "turns out" in the end. That's where classic sagas of unreality, like The Wizard of Oz (at least in its technicolor incarnation) come in. The musical Wicked, the sensation which took home 14 major awards (including a few Grammys and Tonys), plays up to the fanciful expectations of diehard Broadway lovers, in its limited engagement at the Orpheum Theatre. More
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Theater
A fun stroll to the yellow brick road
It's been one hundred three years since L. Frank Baum penned his storied fable The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and more than sixty years since Victor Fleming immortalized the tale in film. What allows The Wizard of Oz to endure as a classic are the universal themes that people of all ages can relate to. Children appreciate the story at face value, a scared child simply wanting to return to the safe haven of her home, while adults can see the symbolic meanings behind each of the characters. Fast forward to 2003, and we now look at the times leading up to Dorothy... More
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Theater
A Classic Case of the Domestic Squabble
Frustratingly verbose games of cat and mouse; privileged yet disgruntled middle-aged harpies having at it; hardly suppressed Electra complexes; emasculated college professors burying their woes in a nightcap and a novel. Yes, my friends, that's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in a proverbial nutshell. Edward Albee's 1962 play, with its characteristic histrionics and intentional shock value, might seem dated these days, but it did for theater what films like Last Tango in Paris did for cinema--namely, it created a new vernacular for its form, one which seethed with bitter contempt for traditional family values and canned gender roles. More
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Theater
Golden Anniversary
If you graduated from high school, chances are very good that you've had at least one encounter with Samuel Beckett's sparse, riddling play Waiting for Godot. This year Godot, which many who know of such things call one of the most influential plays of the twentieth-century turns fifty, and to celebrate the A.C.T. has decided to revive the old goat once again. Carey Perloff, the A.C.T.'s artistic director, sits at the helm as the director of the production. More
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Theater
For A New Asian American Outlook, Head Under The Rainbow
"Under the Rainbow" written and directed by the renowned Philip Kan Gotanda hits us from multiple angles. Presented by the Asian American Theater Company, the two one-act plays take typical racial identity issues and reframe them in interesting and novel ways. More
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