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"content": "\u003cp>Somewhere in the middle of the first act of \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig,\u003c/b> I realized that I was already plotting my next trip to UC Santa Cruz’s Theatre Arts Mainstage to see this wonderful play at least one more time before it closes on August 31, 2008. I don’t pretend to be the world’s most seasoned theatergoer, but this is the best thing I’ve seen since I had the good fortune last summer to attend a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of \u003cb>Henry IV, Part II\u003c/b> in Stratford-upon-Avon, with the great David Warner as Falstaff. Now \u003cb>Bach\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Henry\u003c/b> could not be more different, and I suppose some might say that the comparison is perhaps a bit heady, but I left both performances similarly exhilarated, filled with the same sense that I had just witnessed a play that was not only entertaining and superbly performed, but also, in its own modest way, important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play opens with 18th-century organist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (Stephen Caffrey) standing in a pool of light, reading a letter that he is about to release by carrier pigeon to his wife, Anna. Costumed in a green velvet coat that’s richly trimmed in gold brocade, with traditional buckled shoes at his feet and gray hose to his breeches (B. Modern lavished similar detail upon each of the play’s seven characters), and crowned with a stunning wig of long curly locks that sits on Caffrey’s head like a mane tops a lion’s (Jakey Hicks’s hairpieces somehow captured each character’s personality perfectly), we know from the first words out of Fasch’s mouth that playwright Itamar Moses is not going to be playing this one entirely straight. While Moses is obviously serious in his meditations about art, religion, and free will, he also appears to be equally serious about not taking such fraught topics too seriously. “My darling Anna,” Fasch begins, “By the time you receive this letter, I will have sent it.” Such Marx Brothers-meet-Yogi Berra logic permeates Moses’s hilarious and intelligent piece. Before long we will come to anticipate such pronouncements, occasionally they will prompt a groan, but we laugh, sometimes against our better judgment, as if, like the characters in Moses’s play repeatedly complain, we had no choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Fasch’s letter brings his wife, whom he addresses by a string of pet names, each more ridiculous than the last, and us to the anteroom of the Thomaskirsche in Leipzig, 1722, the lights come up and we see that Georg Balthasar Schott (Larry Paulsen) has been sitting at the church’s door throughout Fasch’s speech. Fasch, we have learned, is here because his former teacher, the great Johann Kuhnau, who as the head of the Thomasschule once showed Fasch unparalleled favor before naming another as his favorite, has summoned Fasch to his side because he is dying and wishes to choose a successor to what is the most prestigious post for an organist in all of Germany. Fasch, of course, assumes that his teacher has had a change of heart about which of his students was his favorite after all. Blinded by his desire for reconciliation, Fasch sets aside his conviction that man guides his fate after birth, trading it instead for the convenient certainty that destiny has brought him to this particular time and place to teach a new generation of Johanns and Georgs that predestination is nonsense. Fasch may fancy himself a clear-eyed progressive, but like the rest of the characters in this play, and by implication, us, he can also be a fool. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schott has not been as blessed as Fasch was when it comes to the affections of Kuhnau. Though he grew up in Leipzig and is an accomplished enough musician to have become a peer of Kuhnau’s as the organist of a less prestigious church, Schott never attended the Thomasschule or had the opportunity to study under Kuhnau. Schott wears these slights openly on his ample, black sleeves. His history and psychological wounds are just a few of the many reasons why he feels so proprietary when it comes to granting a string of rivals, beginning with Fasch, access to Kuhnau, who is playing a private concert for himself inside. “What brings you here?” he asks Fasch suspiciously. “Stagecoach, primarily,” comes the reply. “And, for this last portion, my feet.” Ba da bump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so the farce begins in earnest, as Moses, with a good deal of excellent accompaniment from director Art Manke, mines this traditional (in other hands, tired) theatrical form to its fullest. On a certain level, \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> is as substantial as a bag of cotton candy from the boardwalk down the hill, a sack of empty calories whose spun circumstances and slapstick humor seem entirely at odds with an 18th-century costume piece about a group of back-stabbing, German Lutheran organists. But Moses’s writing is so smart, his jokes so well timed, and his characters so sympathetically drawn that we embrace the disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t want to ruin the rest of the play for you by revealing anything that comes next, but I’d be remiss not to at least mention the fine performances of this tight-knit company of actors. Caffrey is commanding as Fasch, the free spirit whose early rejection of the Lutheran principle of predetermination no doubt clouded the affections of his dear Kuhnau. Especially good is his speech early in the second act (a tip of the cap to lighting designer David Lee Cuthbert, who managed to build a prison out of nothing but shadows) when, in encouraging Anna to write a fugue, he reveals to the audience what must have been one of the then-24-year-old Moses’s motivations to write a farce about an arcane corner of music history, set in the very quaint-sounding Age of Enlightenment, no less. (Why, you have to wonder, wasn’t Moses writing a prequel to any of the numerous comic-book franchises that every summer splatter like June bugs in the teeth of Hells Angels on the screens of suburban multiplexes? Did his emails to Burbank to help shape the latest Broadway musical version of the latest mediocre Disney cartoon go unanswered? Happily for us, he chose to burrow deeply into this profound and silly story.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paulsen is equally good, entertaining us as his character careens between tenderness and duplicity, surprising us when he explodes in controlled Lutheran rage. The gambling forger Georg Lenck (Allen Gilmore) was perhaps my favorite of the bunch. His noble facade, punctured by his endless schemes to separate everyone he meets from his coin, make his final crumbling almost heartbreaking (okay; it’s mostly just funny). Drew Foster (Johann Martin Steindorff), Paul Vincent O’Connor (Georg Friedrich Kaufmann), and Mike Ryan (Johann Christoph Graupner) round out the fine cast. Foster is an imperious brat, who gets to turn the other cheek, shall we say, in act two. O’Connor is absolutely terrific as Foster’s dottering enemy, who, true to the farce form, knows a good deal more about life and art than his bumbling and blustery exterior lets on. I liked this guy (both the actor and his character) a lot. And then there’s Ryan, whose clown-like fright wig, expressive face, and well-founded paranoia perfectly mirrors his character’s fate, if that’s what we may call it in the context of this play, to be acclaimed as the second greatest organist in all of Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of Johann Sebastian Bach, you ask, the organist in the play’s title? See you at the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> runs through August 31, 2008, on the Theatre Arts Mainstage at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Somewhere in the middle of the first act of \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig,\u003c/b> I realized that I was already plotting my next trip to UC Santa Cruz's Theatre Arts Mainstage to see this wonderful play at least one more time before it closes on August 31, 2008. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Somewhere in the middle of the first act of \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig,\u003c/b> I realized that I was already plotting my next trip to UC Santa Cruz’s Theatre Arts Mainstage to see this wonderful play at least one more time before it closes on August 31, 2008. I don’t pretend to be the world’s most seasoned theatergoer, but this is the best thing I’ve seen since I had the good fortune last summer to attend a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of \u003cb>Henry IV, Part II\u003c/b> in Stratford-upon-Avon, with the great David Warner as Falstaff. Now \u003cb>Bach\u003c/b> and \u003cb>Henry\u003c/b> could not be more different, and I suppose some might say that the comparison is perhaps a bit heady, but I left both performances similarly exhilarated, filled with the same sense that I had just witnessed a play that was not only entertaining and superbly performed, but also, in its own modest way, important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play opens with 18th-century organist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (Stephen Caffrey) standing in a pool of light, reading a letter that he is about to release by carrier pigeon to his wife, Anna. Costumed in a green velvet coat that’s richly trimmed in gold brocade, with traditional buckled shoes at his feet and gray hose to his breeches (B. Modern lavished similar detail upon each of the play’s seven characters), and crowned with a stunning wig of long curly locks that sits on Caffrey’s head like a mane tops a lion’s (Jakey Hicks’s hairpieces somehow captured each character’s personality perfectly), we know from the first words out of Fasch’s mouth that playwright Itamar Moses is not going to be playing this one entirely straight. While Moses is obviously serious in his meditations about art, religion, and free will, he also appears to be equally serious about not taking such fraught topics too seriously. “My darling Anna,” Fasch begins, “By the time you receive this letter, I will have sent it.” Such Marx Brothers-meet-Yogi Berra logic permeates Moses’s hilarious and intelligent piece. Before long we will come to anticipate such pronouncements, occasionally they will prompt a groan, but we laugh, sometimes against our better judgment, as if, like the characters in Moses’s play repeatedly complain, we had no choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Fasch’s letter brings his wife, whom he addresses by a string of pet names, each more ridiculous than the last, and us to the anteroom of the Thomaskirsche in Leipzig, 1722, the lights come up and we see that Georg Balthasar Schott (Larry Paulsen) has been sitting at the church’s door throughout Fasch’s speech. Fasch, we have learned, is here because his former teacher, the great Johann Kuhnau, who as the head of the Thomasschule once showed Fasch unparalleled favor before naming another as his favorite, has summoned Fasch to his side because he is dying and wishes to choose a successor to what is the most prestigious post for an organist in all of Germany. Fasch, of course, assumes that his teacher has had a change of heart about which of his students was his favorite after all. Blinded by his desire for reconciliation, Fasch sets aside his conviction that man guides his fate after birth, trading it instead for the convenient certainty that destiny has brought him to this particular time and place to teach a new generation of Johanns and Georgs that predestination is nonsense. Fasch may fancy himself a clear-eyed progressive, but like the rest of the characters in this play, and by implication, us, he can also be a fool. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schott has not been as blessed as Fasch was when it comes to the affections of Kuhnau. Though he grew up in Leipzig and is an accomplished enough musician to have become a peer of Kuhnau’s as the organist of a less prestigious church, Schott never attended the Thomasschule or had the opportunity to study under Kuhnau. Schott wears these slights openly on his ample, black sleeves. His history and psychological wounds are just a few of the many reasons why he feels so proprietary when it comes to granting a string of rivals, beginning with Fasch, access to Kuhnau, who is playing a private concert for himself inside. “What brings you here?” he asks Fasch suspiciously. “Stagecoach, primarily,” comes the reply. “And, for this last portion, my feet.” Ba da bump.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so the farce begins in earnest, as Moses, with a good deal of excellent accompaniment from director Art Manke, mines this traditional (in other hands, tired) theatrical form to its fullest. On a certain level, \u003cb>Bach at Leipzig\u003c/b> is as substantial as a bag of cotton candy from the boardwalk down the hill, a sack of empty calories whose spun circumstances and slapstick humor seem entirely at odds with an 18th-century costume piece about a group of back-stabbing, German Lutheran organists. But Moses’s writing is so smart, his jokes so well timed, and his characters so sympathetically drawn that we embrace the disconnect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I don’t want to ruin the rest of the play for you by revealing anything that comes next, but I’d be remiss not to at least mention the fine performances of this tight-knit company of actors. Caffrey is commanding as Fasch, the free spirit whose early rejection of the Lutheran principle of predetermination no doubt clouded the affections of his dear Kuhnau. Especially good is his speech early in the second act (a tip of the cap to lighting designer David Lee Cuthbert, who managed to build a prison out of nothing but shadows) when, in encouraging Anna to write a fugue, he reveals to the audience what must have been one of the then-24-year-old Moses’s motivations to write a farce about an arcane corner of music history, set in the very quaint-sounding Age of Enlightenment, no less. (Why, you have to wonder, wasn’t Moses writing a prequel to any of the numerous comic-book franchises that every summer splatter like June bugs in the teeth of Hells Angels on the screens of suburban multiplexes? Did his emails to Burbank to help shape the latest Broadway musical version of the latest mediocre Disney cartoon go unanswered? Happily for us, he chose to burrow deeply into this profound and silly story.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Paulsen is equally good, entertaining us as his character careens between tenderness and duplicity, surprising us when he explodes in controlled Lutheran rage. The gambling forger Georg Lenck (Allen Gilmore) was perhaps my favorite of the bunch. His noble facade, punctured by his endless schemes to separate everyone he meets from his coin, make his final crumbling almost heartbreaking (okay; it’s mostly just funny). Drew Foster (Johann Martin Steindorff), Paul Vincent O’Connor (Georg Friedrich Kaufmann), and Mike Ryan (Johann Christoph Graupner) round out the fine cast. Foster is an imperious brat, who gets to turn the other cheek, shall we say, in act two. O’Connor is absolutely terrific as Foster’s dottering enemy, who, true to the farce form, knows a good deal more about life and art than his bumbling and blustery exterior lets on. I liked this guy (both the actor and his character) a lot. And then there’s Ryan, whose clown-like fright wig, expressive face, and well-founded paranoia perfectly mirrors his character’s fate, if that’s what we may call it in the context of this play, to be acclaimed as the second greatest organist in all of Germany.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what of Johann Sebastian Bach, you ask, the organist in the play’s title? See you at the show.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "DOUBT, A Parable at TheatreWorks",
"headTitle": "DOUBT, A Parable at TheatreWorks | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Father Brendan Flynn (Cassidy Brown) is a man who likes to tell stories, which he does every Sunday at St. Nicholas church in the Bronx, and through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, where TheatreWorks is presenting John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, \u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b>. The 90-minute, intermission-less production is uniformly excellent, from the clever and effective staging by Tom Langguth, to the very strong performances by the play’s four fine actors, who, I’m told, were primarily directed by TheatreWorks dramaturg, Vickie Rozell, even though TheatreWorks artistic director, Robert Kelley, shares the credit in the program, although I have grave doubts that this rumor is actually true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what it feels like to doubt and to be doubted — neither is pleasant. Which is to say, go see this play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> opens, Flynn is preaching to his congregation about the virtues of doubt. “Doubt,” he tells his 1964-era, Irish and Italian flock, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” JFK, our nation’s first and last Catholic president, had recently been assassinated. Pope John, who began the process of making the Mass more accessible to parishioners by, among other things, allowing the congregation to recite its prayers in English instead of Latin, had died a few months before. In short, Flynn’s audience is suffering from what he characterizes as group despair. Which is not to say that their situation is hopeless: When you are lost, he consoles them, take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Kimberly King) is the polar opposite of the warm-hearted, compassionate Father. The principal of the church’s school, Sister Aloysius is a woman of extreme moral rectitude, who looks at a ballpoint pen and sees a pagan idol to the sin of sloth. Her intimidating, no-nonsense office is “decorated” with a photograph of His Holiness. Feared by students and colleagues alike, she believes the world is a hard and heartless place, a cesspool bursting at the seams with evil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sister Aloysius’s paranoia is acute, it is grounded in experience — she lost her husband in World War II. So when one of her teachers, the deferential Sister James (Kristin Stokes), stops by her office for a meeting, Sister Aloysius makes it her mission to shake the bunny rabbits and puppy dogs out of James’s idealistic young head. In fact, Sister Aloysius wants Sister James to keep an eye on Father Flynn because Aloysius has doubts about him, specifically regarding the propriety of his relationships with some of the school boys. Innocent that she is, Sister James is taken aback by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions. James is clearly infatuated with Father Flynn, so much so that at one point Sister Aloysius interrupts her gushing with a curt “You’d trade anything for a warm look.” When all is said and done, wouldn’t most of us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No doubt the back and forth between the two women had some audience members squirming in their seats, as if THEY were being given the third degree by Aloysius and not the wide-eyed James. But King’s nasal monotone is almost too spot-on a caricature of the classic penguin. The Aloysius that King conjures has a keen sense of humor, and although no one would dare call King’s creation a softy, it would have been interesting to see the character played with a bit more menace. That said, King and Stokes make a good team, which in this case is more than enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius is not the only one at the church who likes to play the mentor, taking selected individuals under her wing. Between sermons, Father Flynn is the school’s basketball coach, which gives him the opportunity to expose his young charges to his beliefs about everything from the length and cleanliness of one’s fingernails to the ways in which one must deceive one’s adversary when preparing for a shot at the foul line. No coincidence, I’m sure, the lecture on deception, which, when added to his occupation as a teller of tales, quickly coalesce into an unsettling pattern. Could that crazy penguin be right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We find out soon enough when Father Flynn is summoned to the principal’s office for a meeting with Sisters Aloysius and James to discuss the upcoming Christmas pageant. Flynn believes the songs performed at the pageant should be expanded to include tunes parishioners are hearing on their radios, songs like “Frosty the Snowman,” which both James and Flynn love but Aloysius thinks encourages a belief in the dark arts (her objection is that a magic hat makes Frosty come to life). Carefully, Aloysius steers the conversation to the subject of a boy named Donald, the school’s only black student who, James claims, returned to her classroom from a private meeting with the Father smelling of booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many clever devices in \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> is the way Shanley uses the exact same circumstances as justifications for the diametrically opposite views of Flynn and Aloysius. For example, Flynn resents Aloysius’s accusation because its delivery by her to him flies in the face of the very church rules on authority and chain of command that Aloysius holds so dear. It is authority, after all, that permits Aloysius to bend the impressionable mind of a subordinate to her will. Similarly, Aloysius believes herself to be a better messenger of God because of her unflinching adherence the scripture’s finest print. Flynn believes he’s more holy because he’s acting upon the dictates of the church’s current leaders, who, he seems to suggest, would wholeheartedly approve of his idea to take some of the boys on an overnight camping trip — in the interest of breaking down barriers between the church and the community, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t revealed more than you have probably already heard or will quickly surmise when you settle into your seat, but to say just about anything else would begin to tread into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that even though Shanley has said that the play’s second act begins when the audience starts discussing its doubts about Flynn’s motivations and Aloysius’s zeal, I doubt that a churchyard who-done-it with a do-it-yourself ending was really all the playwright had in mind. Doubt, after all, is evidence of humanity, whose appearance will always trump even the most clever plot twists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b> runs through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $26 to $64. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatreworks.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatreworks.org or call 650-903-6000.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Father Brendan Flynn (Cassidy Brown) is a man who likes to tell stories, which he does every Sunday at St. Nicholas church in the Bronx, and through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto, where TheatreWorks is presenting John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play, \u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b>. The 90-minute, intermission-less production is uniformly excellent, from the clever and effective staging by Tom Langguth, to the very strong performances by the play’s four fine actors, who, I’m told, were primarily directed by TheatreWorks dramaturg, Vickie Rozell, even though TheatreWorks artistic director, Robert Kelley, shares the credit in the program, although I have grave doubts that this rumor is actually true.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what it feels like to doubt and to be doubted — neither is pleasant. Which is to say, go see this play.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> opens, Flynn is preaching to his congregation about the virtues of doubt. “Doubt,” he tells his 1964-era, Irish and Italian flock, “can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty.” JFK, our nation’s first and last Catholic president, had recently been assassinated. Pope John, who began the process of making the Mass more accessible to parishioners by, among other things, allowing the congregation to recite its prayers in English instead of Latin, had died a few months before. In short, Flynn’s audience is suffering from what he characterizes as group despair. Which is not to say that their situation is hopeless: When you are lost, he consoles them, take comfort in the knowledge that you are not alone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Kimberly King) is the polar opposite of the warm-hearted, compassionate Father. The principal of the church’s school, Sister Aloysius is a woman of extreme moral rectitude, who looks at a ballpoint pen and sees a pagan idol to the sin of sloth. Her intimidating, no-nonsense office is “decorated” with a photograph of His Holiness. Feared by students and colleagues alike, she believes the world is a hard and heartless place, a cesspool bursting at the seams with evil.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Sister Aloysius’s paranoia is acute, it is grounded in experience — she lost her husband in World War II. So when one of her teachers, the deferential Sister James (Kristin Stokes), stops by her office for a meeting, Sister Aloysius makes it her mission to shake the bunny rabbits and puppy dogs out of James’s idealistic young head. In fact, Sister Aloysius wants Sister James to keep an eye on Father Flynn because Aloysius has doubts about him, specifically regarding the propriety of his relationships with some of the school boys. Innocent that she is, Sister James is taken aback by Sister Aloysius’s suspicions. James is clearly infatuated with Father Flynn, so much so that at one point Sister Aloysius interrupts her gushing with a curt “You’d trade anything for a warm look.” When all is said and done, wouldn’t most of us?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>No doubt the back and forth between the two women had some audience members squirming in their seats, as if THEY were being given the third degree by Aloysius and not the wide-eyed James. But King’s nasal monotone is almost too spot-on a caricature of the classic penguin. The Aloysius that King conjures has a keen sense of humor, and although no one would dare call King’s creation a softy, it would have been interesting to see the character played with a bit more menace. That said, King and Stokes make a good team, which in this case is more than enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sister Aloysius is not the only one at the church who likes to play the mentor, taking selected individuals under her wing. Between sermons, Father Flynn is the school’s basketball coach, which gives him the opportunity to expose his young charges to his beliefs about everything from the length and cleanliness of one’s fingernails to the ways in which one must deceive one’s adversary when preparing for a shot at the foul line. No coincidence, I’m sure, the lecture on deception, which, when added to his occupation as a teller of tales, quickly coalesce into an unsettling pattern. Could that crazy penguin be right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We find out soon enough when Father Flynn is summoned to the principal’s office for a meeting with Sisters Aloysius and James to discuss the upcoming Christmas pageant. Flynn believes the songs performed at the pageant should be expanded to include tunes parishioners are hearing on their radios, songs like “Frosty the Snowman,” which both James and Flynn love but Aloysius thinks encourages a belief in the dark arts (her objection is that a magic hat makes Frosty come to life). Carefully, Aloysius steers the conversation to the subject of a boy named Donald, the school’s only black student who, James claims, returned to her classroom from a private meeting with the Father smelling of booze.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many clever devices in \u003cb>DOUBT\u003c/b> is the way Shanley uses the exact same circumstances as justifications for the diametrically opposite views of Flynn and Aloysius. For example, Flynn resents Aloysius’s accusation because its delivery by her to him flies in the face of the very church rules on authority and chain of command that Aloysius holds so dear. It is authority, after all, that permits Aloysius to bend the impressionable mind of a subordinate to her will. Similarly, Aloysius believes herself to be a better messenger of God because of her unflinching adherence the scripture’s finest print. Flynn believes he’s more holy because he’s acting upon the dictates of the church’s current leaders, who, he seems to suggest, would wholeheartedly approve of his idea to take some of the boys on an overnight camping trip — in the interest of breaking down barriers between the church and the community, of course.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I haven’t revealed more than you have probably already heard or will quickly surmise when you settle into your seat, but to say just about anything else would begin to tread into spoiler territory. Suffice it to say that even though Shanley has said that the play’s second act begins when the audience starts discussing its doubts about Flynn’s motivations and Aloysius’s zeal, I doubt that a churchyard who-done-it with a do-it-yourself ending was really all the playwright had in mind. Doubt, after all, is evidence of humanity, whose appearance will always trump even the most clever plot twists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>DOUBT, A Parable\u003c/b> runs through August 10, 2008, at the Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. Tickets are $26 to $64. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatreworks.org\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatreworks.org or call 650-903-6000.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you’ve never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare’s most popular play is for you. Lots of handsome, testosterone-fueled young men run shirtless around the fake-stone stage; Juliet (Caitlin FitzGerald) is suitably self absorbed, rich, and beautiful; and Romeo (Charles Pasternak) is a lover who brings it, at one point dangling from the industrial metal catwalk that links the second floors of the set’s two main structures before executing a chin up to give his beloved a kiss. Ooh. Ahh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins promisingly enough. Romeo, the only son of Lord and Lady Montague, is alone in his tree fort, gazing bleakly into the darkness. Juliet, the only daughter of Lord and Lady Capulet, is standing at her iconic balcony window in a whisper of a dress, her body the embodiment of a sigh. Each is searching the blank night for something to fill the voids in their lives, yet each is unaware of the other, let alone their shared longing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, before we have a chance to consider what we know lies ahead for the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers, a tangle of gypsy clichés commandeer the stage. Pretty much without exception, the men are all brutes who appear to shop at Urban Outfitters and are only lacking matching distressed My Chemical Romance t-shirts from Hot Topic to complete their ridiculous costumes. The women are girl-can’t-help-it teases who bang tambourines but aren’t afraid to use a knife when the advances of their male counterparts turn brutal. High spirits and the promise of sex quickly descends into lust and violence. Within seconds the rabble are at each other’s throats, armed with swords, switchblades, and Dustbusters. By the time Prince Escalus (Gene Gillette) strides into this hormonal mosh pit to reign in the riot between the shirts and the skins (most of the Montague men wear only open vests above their belts), the only thing that rings true is the prince’s characterization of his subjects as beasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civility momentarily restored, it’s time to meet our heroes. We are introduced to Romeo by his cousin Benvolio (Erik Hellman), who seeks out the sulking lad on behalf of his worried uncle and aunt. Benvolio learns that unrequited love is the cause of Romeo’s Emo ‘tude, although the words that Shakespeare has put into the mouths of this randy pair suggest that for Romeo, it may have been more of a case of blue balls than a broken heart. I liked this scene a lot, with Romeo and Benvolio getting comfortable in their characters as they lounge carelessly on the skirts of the uncomfortable stage. The scene blossoms even more with the arrival of a Capulet servant named Peter (Mick Mize), who is like a live-action version of the hapless Linguini character in \u003cb>Ratatouille\u003c/b>. In the first act, anyway, when Mize is given free reign to play his character like the clown that he is, he steals just about every scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over at the house of Capulet, we learn about the barely 14, Converse-clad Juliet through the eyes of her nurse (Saundra McClain), even though her alcoholic, stiletto-heeled, Bride-of-Frankenstein-hairdo mother (Yvonne Woods) shares the stage. As Juliet’s nurse recalls the day her precious charge was born, she and Lady Capulet shave the slouching girl’s legs and underarms in a funny and charming scene that made me think of a pampered Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s \u003cb>Marie Antoinette\u003c/b>. Would that FitzGerald had been given the latitude by director Kim Rubinstein to sustain this childlike version of Juliet throughout the play. It was more engaging, and felt more true to Shakespeare’s character, than the Gwyneth Paltrow turn that dominates the second act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two doomed love birds meet at a party at Juliet’s house, where she sings a Karaoke version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with various Capulet women on backup vocals. During her performance, Juliet dances with a pair of would-be suitors, including the tragic Paris (Jon Gentry). Both men dance like complete numbskulls, a mean trick on the director’s part to help ensure that we have no sympathy for them vis-a-vis Juliet’s eventual affection for her Romeo. Paris always struck me as a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than a villain, so the director’s decision to manipulate the audience’s impression of the man through the use of cheap theatrics seems, well, cheap. I have no problem with putting small household appliances in the hands of random actors, or giving us a window on a character by having her conjure Mama Cass, but the systematic dehumanization of Paris is one of this production’s numerous sins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, the most serious problems with Rubinstein’s \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> are not her stylistic choices — costumes that range from ancient Budapest to contemporary Alphabet City, for example — but the substantive changes she has made to Shakespeare’s play. While Paris is being dehumanized, Romeo is being transformed into a character for whom we have faint sympathy. For almost three hours, Pasternak’s Romeo wails and whines his lines at the same bellowing pitch. At times he literally stumbles about the stage, so drunk with grief that he can barely keep himself erect as he bawls his lines to the heavens. Good grief this guy is tiresome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Romeo is no mere victim of blood (he’s a Montague) and circumstance (in love with a Capulet). When he eventually kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (David Arrow) he does so by stabbing the man in the chest not once, as in the original, but twice. Not content with this 100% increase in Romeo’s violence toward Tybalt, Rubinstein directs him to knife Juliet’s cousin again, this time in the back, after which he slits his adversary’s throat. Granted, the fight scene between Romeo and Tybalt is one of the better physical sequences of the play, but the Romeo that the audience sees appears too practiced at, and too familiar with, the killing of men. What, we wonder, could Juliet possibly see in this violent cad? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Would that there were more moments like the scene in which the nurse reports Romeo’s murder of Tybalt to Juliet on one side of the stage (“I saw the wound,” she tells Juliet, to which my son leaned over to me and muttered “Which one?”) while Friar Laurence (Richard Farrell) informs Romeo of his banishment from Verona for the crime. Or the moment early in the second act, when the gypsies are joined by a very gifted Erik Hellman, who reveals to us that Benvolio is not only a good friend to Romeo and, apparently, the only young male Montague who knows how to button a shirt, but he is also an accomplished guitarist. By the end of this spoiled play, which I won’t spoil for you any more than I already have, Rubinstein flirts with Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet’s final moments on Earth, except unlike Luhrmann, she doesn’t deliver anything resembling a payoff to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> runs through August 21, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you've never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare's most popular play is for you. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you like watching \u003cb>Gossip Girl\u003c/b> on The CW and you’ve never seen an actual performance of \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> before, then maybe, just maybe, the current Shakespeare Santa Cruz production of the William Shakespeare’s most popular play is for you. Lots of handsome, testosterone-fueled young men run shirtless around the fake-stone stage; Juliet (Caitlin FitzGerald) is suitably self absorbed, rich, and beautiful; and Romeo (Charles Pasternak) is a lover who brings it, at one point dangling from the industrial metal catwalk that links the second floors of the set’s two main structures before executing a chin up to give his beloved a kiss. Ooh. Ahh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play begins promisingly enough. Romeo, the only son of Lord and Lady Montague, is alone in his tree fort, gazing bleakly into the darkness. Juliet, the only daughter of Lord and Lady Capulet, is standing at her iconic balcony window in a whisper of a dress, her body the embodiment of a sigh. Each is searching the blank night for something to fill the voids in their lives, yet each is unaware of the other, let alone their shared longing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, before we have a chance to consider what we know lies ahead for the world’s most famous star-crossed lovers, a tangle of gypsy clichés commandeer the stage. Pretty much without exception, the men are all brutes who appear to shop at Urban Outfitters and are only lacking matching distressed My Chemical Romance t-shirts from Hot Topic to complete their ridiculous costumes. The women are girl-can’t-help-it teases who bang tambourines but aren’t afraid to use a knife when the advances of their male counterparts turn brutal. High spirits and the promise of sex quickly descends into lust and violence. Within seconds the rabble are at each other’s throats, armed with swords, switchblades, and Dustbusters. By the time Prince Escalus (Gene Gillette) strides into this hormonal mosh pit to reign in the riot between the shirts and the skins (most of the Montague men wear only open vests above their belts), the only thing that rings true is the prince’s characterization of his subjects as beasts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Civility momentarily restored, it’s time to meet our heroes. We are introduced to Romeo by his cousin Benvolio (Erik Hellman), who seeks out the sulking lad on behalf of his worried uncle and aunt. Benvolio learns that unrequited love is the cause of Romeo’s Emo ‘tude, although the words that Shakespeare has put into the mouths of this randy pair suggest that for Romeo, it may have been more of a case of blue balls than a broken heart. I liked this scene a lot, with Romeo and Benvolio getting comfortable in their characters as they lounge carelessly on the skirts of the uncomfortable stage. The scene blossoms even more with the arrival of a Capulet servant named Peter (Mick Mize), who is like a live-action version of the hapless Linguini character in \u003cb>Ratatouille\u003c/b>. In the first act, anyway, when Mize is given free reign to play his character like the clown that he is, he steals just about every scene.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Over at the house of Capulet, we learn about the barely 14, Converse-clad Juliet through the eyes of her nurse (Saundra McClain), even though her alcoholic, stiletto-heeled, Bride-of-Frankenstein-hairdo mother (Yvonne Woods) shares the stage. As Juliet’s nurse recalls the day her precious charge was born, she and Lady Capulet shave the slouching girl’s legs and underarms in a funny and charming scene that made me think of a pampered Kirsten Dunst in Sofia Coppola’s \u003cb>Marie Antoinette\u003c/b>. Would that FitzGerald had been given the latitude by director Kim Rubinstein to sustain this childlike version of Juliet throughout the play. It was more engaging, and felt more true to Shakespeare’s character, than the Gwyneth Paltrow turn that dominates the second act.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two doomed love birds meet at a party at Juliet’s house, where she sings a Karaoke version of “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” with various Capulet women on backup vocals. During her performance, Juliet dances with a pair of would-be suitors, including the tragic Paris (Jon Gentry). Both men dance like complete numbskulls, a mean trick on the director’s part to help ensure that we have no sympathy for them vis-a-vis Juliet’s eventual affection for her Romeo. Paris always struck me as a guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time rather than a villain, so the director’s decision to manipulate the audience’s impression of the man through the use of cheap theatrics seems, well, cheap. I have no problem with putting small household appliances in the hands of random actors, or giving us a window on a character by having her conjure Mama Cass, but the systematic dehumanization of Paris is one of this production’s numerous sins.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, the most serious problems with Rubinstein’s \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> are not her stylistic choices — costumes that range from ancient Budapest to contemporary Alphabet City, for example — but the substantive changes she has made to Shakespeare’s play. While Paris is being dehumanized, Romeo is being transformed into a character for whom we have faint sympathy. For almost three hours, Pasternak’s Romeo wails and whines his lines at the same bellowing pitch. At times he literally stumbles about the stage, so drunk with grief that he can barely keep himself erect as he bawls his lines to the heavens. Good grief this guy is tiresome.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Romeo is no mere victim of blood (he’s a Montague) and circumstance (in love with a Capulet). When he eventually kills Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (David Arrow) he does so by stabbing the man in the chest not once, as in the original, but twice. Not content with this 100% increase in Romeo’s violence toward Tybalt, Rubinstein directs him to knife Juliet’s cousin again, this time in the back, after which he slits his adversary’s throat. Granted, the fight scene between Romeo and Tybalt is one of the better physical sequences of the play, but the Romeo that the audience sees appears too practiced at, and too familiar with, the killing of men. What, we wonder, could Juliet possibly see in this violent cad? \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Would that there were more moments like the scene in which the nurse reports Romeo’s murder of Tybalt to Juliet on one side of the stage (“I saw the wound,” she tells Juliet, to which my son leaned over to me and muttered “Which one?”) while Friar Laurence (Richard Farrell) informs Romeo of his banishment from Verona for the crime. Or the moment early in the second act, when the gypsies are joined by a very gifted Erik Hellman, who reveals to us that Benvolio is not only a good friend to Romeo and, apparently, the only young male Montague who knows how to button a shirt, but he is also an accomplished guitarist. By the end of this spoiled play, which I won’t spoil for you any more than I already have, Rubinstein flirts with Baz Luhrmann’s interpretation of Romeo and Juliet’s final moments on Earth, except unlike Luhrmann, she doesn’t deliver anything resembling a payoff to the audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> runs through August 21, 2008, at the Sinsheimer-Stanley Festival Glen at UC Santa Cruz. Tickets are $12 to $44. For \u003ca href=\"https://www.santacruztickets.com/Online/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit santacruztickets.com or call 831-459-2159.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Is director Bill English crazy — or simply just ambitious enough?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some reason, the SF Playhouse’s Artistic Director decided to rehearse a cast of mostly part-time actors to put on the stage version of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> in four short weeks. But they’ve done it. In fact, it’s a testament to San Francisco’s downtown theatre scene that the Playhouse pulled off an impressive interpretation that spotlights some of the best of this city’s talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake — producing this play is a serious task. Consider its legacy: over 42 years, five major revivals (two Broadway, three West End), and an Oscar-winning film adaptation that sealed the fame of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> has become an institution. Thankfully, the mercilessly short prep time didn’t prevent the Playhouse cast and crew from producing a deft, passionate interpretation that brought the sold-out house to its feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in Berlin in 1930 during the Nazis’ rise to power, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> centers itself at the decadent Kit Kat Klub and focuses on two doomed love stories. One of these is between British cabaret performer Sally Bowles (played by the director’s daughter Lauren English) and newly arrived young American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Daniel Krueger); the other is between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider (Karen Grassle, who played Ma in the ’70s TV series \u003cb>Little House on the Prairie\u003c/b>) and elderly Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Louis Parnell). Key to the play is the Emcee character — played by the inimitable Bryan Yates Sharber — a one-man Greek chorus who presents the performances at the Kit Kat as prescient commentary on the state of society in Weimar Germany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English smartly takes his cue from the two ’90s London revivals directed by Sam Mendes, which among other things results in a more sexualized take on the book — one that highlights Cliff’s bisexuality and includes boys among the Kit Kat girls. The choreography for the Kit Kat numbers is heaped with polyamorous crotch-grinding and ass-slapping, an extra touch of bawdiness that works well both for its own sake and in contrast to the tenderness of the older couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also like Mendes, English resourcefully uses the musical talents of many of his cast members in the 8-person Kit Kat band, resulting in brilliant moments like Sharber being tossed his clarinet to vamp on eight quick bars in the middle of the tune “Money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With such a squeezed schedule in front of him, English made crucial casting decisions for the Emcee and Bowles characters. Grey’s ownership of the Emcee role in the original Broadway show has made later interpretations by stars like John Stamos and Neil Patrick Harris seem like well-crafted clonings. But rather than mimicking Grey’s famously mincing, marionette-ish persona, Sharber projects a brassy, physical, almost lion-like character, and pulls off both lusty song-and-dance numbers and ominous narration with aplomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, a successful \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> depends on a larger-than-life Sally Bowles, and Lauren English indubitably delivers the goods. As an actor and singer, she’s definitely got the personality to fit such a wide-ranging role. Both her wonderful smirk in “Don’t Tell Mama” and the genuine hysteria she injects into the tragic title tune speak volumes of her capability, and she’s an excellent counterpoint to Krueger’s skillful take on the anxious Cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, English’s production team has truly sealed \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b>‘s success. Tatjana Genser’s versatile stage management showed a real instinct for economizing space, while both Valera Coble’s costuming (especially the simple black-and-red outfits in “Two Ladies”) and Mike Oesch’s intuitive lighting design amplified both the show’s glitz and its sense of tragic irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, on paper, English’s scheduling for \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> does seem mad. But on stage, it’s simply excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> is playing at the SF Playhouse. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season0708/cabaret.php\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Is director Bill English crazy — or simply just ambitious enough?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For some reason, the SF Playhouse’s Artistic Director decided to rehearse a cast of mostly part-time actors to put on the stage version of John Kander and Fred Ebb’s legendary \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> in four short weeks. But they’ve done it. In fact, it’s a testament to San Francisco’s downtown theatre scene that the Playhouse pulled off an impressive interpretation that spotlights some of the best of this city’s talent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Make no mistake — producing this play is a serious task. Consider its legacy: over 42 years, five major revivals (two Broadway, three West End), and an Oscar-winning film adaptation that sealed the fame of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> has become an institution. Thankfully, the mercilessly short prep time didn’t prevent the Playhouse cast and crew from producing a deft, passionate interpretation that brought the sold-out house to its feet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set in Berlin in 1930 during the Nazis’ rise to power, \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> centers itself at the decadent Kit Kat Klub and focuses on two doomed love stories. One of these is between British cabaret performer Sally Bowles (played by the director’s daughter Lauren English) and newly arrived young American writer, Cliff Bradshaw (Daniel Krueger); the other is between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider (Karen Grassle, who played Ma in the ’70s TV series \u003cb>Little House on the Prairie\u003c/b>) and elderly Jewish fruit vendor Herr Schultz (Louis Parnell). Key to the play is the Emcee character — played by the inimitable Bryan Yates Sharber — a one-man Greek chorus who presents the performances at the Kit Kat as prescient commentary on the state of society in Weimar Germany. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>English smartly takes his cue from the two ’90s London revivals directed by Sam Mendes, which among other things results in a more sexualized take on the book — one that highlights Cliff’s bisexuality and includes boys among the Kit Kat girls. The choreography for the Kit Kat numbers is heaped with polyamorous crotch-grinding and ass-slapping, an extra touch of bawdiness that works well both for its own sake and in contrast to the tenderness of the older couple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also like Mendes, English resourcefully uses the musical talents of many of his cast members in the 8-person Kit Kat band, resulting in brilliant moments like Sharber being tossed his clarinet to vamp on eight quick bars in the middle of the tune “Money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With such a squeezed schedule in front of him, English made crucial casting decisions for the Emcee and Bowles characters. Grey’s ownership of the Emcee role in the original Broadway show has made later interpretations by stars like John Stamos and Neil Patrick Harris seem like well-crafted clonings. But rather than mimicking Grey’s famously mincing, marionette-ish persona, Sharber projects a brassy, physical, almost lion-like character, and pulls off both lusty song-and-dance numbers and ominous narration with aplomb.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Of course, a successful \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> depends on a larger-than-life Sally Bowles, and Lauren English indubitably delivers the goods. As an actor and singer, she’s definitely got the personality to fit such a wide-ranging role. Both her wonderful smirk in “Don’t Tell Mama” and the genuine hysteria she injects into the tragic title tune speak volumes of her capability, and she’s an excellent counterpoint to Krueger’s skillful take on the anxious Cliff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Finally, English’s production team has truly sealed \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b>‘s success. Tatjana Genser’s versatile stage management showed a real instinct for economizing space, while both Valera Coble’s costuming (especially the simple black-and-red outfits in “Two Ladies”) and Mike Oesch’s intuitive lighting design amplified both the show’s glitz and its sense of tragic irony.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, on paper, English’s scheduling for \u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> does seem mad. But on stage, it’s simply excellent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Cabaret\u003c/b> is playing at the SF Playhouse. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.sfplayhouse.org/season0708/cabaret.php\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit www.sfplayhouse.org or call 415-677-9596.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Blasted at the Mosser Hotel",
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"content": "\u003cp>The play’s the thing, a sage English playwright once wrote. With due respect to Sarah Kane’s brutal, ambiguous text, and the brave cast of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b>, the major reasons to check out the British theatre troupe 19:29’s production at the Hotel Mosser are the location and environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The weirdness begins in the lobby, where the eight theatergoers privy to each performance are outfitted with black hoods cut out with eye and mouth holes. From the moment we boarded the elevator I dug being semi-anonymous, even during a steamy Thursday matinee, though I never quite grasped the point. Perhaps the hoods encourage the audience’s voyeuristic impulse, increasing our comfort level with a parade of (simulated) wankery, shagging, fellatio and buggery. Or maybe our masks were for the actors’ benefit, allowing them a hairsbreadth of distance during a 90-minute piece that unfolds in incredible (and occasionally fleeting comic) proximity in a cramped, two-room suite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We shuffled awkwardly around the suite, noting the double bed in one room and the gin and couch in the other, until Ian and Cate entered. We deduced they were the actors, for they weren’t wearing hoods. He’s a boozing, prematurely gray journalist; she’s a young blonde waif who, we learn, was once his girlfriend. \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b> quickly shapes up as a tense, claustrophobic but familiar power play, with Cate fending off the husky Ian’s sexual advances. To add even more menace and mystery, Ian displays his gun, which he carries to fend off some threat lurking in the streets below, or perhaps to end his own nihilistic existence in this nondescript hotel room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are obvious advantages to having the audience precede the actors into the suite, but there’s one major negative: It felt as if they had to stake out and claim the space from us. Had the actors already been in the room and in mid-conversation when we arrived, our discomfort at invading their privacy — and, eventually, witnessing their extreme vulnerability — would have been heightened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heightened, however, to a point that might well have been intolerable. Directors Felix Mortimer and Susanna Davies-Crook have settled on an awkward middle ground that bows to American mainstream sensibilities and protects the actors, but undercuts the premise of both the play and its hyper-intimate staging. While I have no great need to observe strangers five or seven feet away performing sexual acts — call me a pervert — it rings false to simulate such acts with the audience looking over the actors’ shoulders. You can’t go halfway without risking looking ridiculous, and losing your grip on the paying customers\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That said, Stephanie Jane de Whalley (who I gather to be the only British member of the cast, and a veteran of 19:29’s Leeds production), and American thespians Thomas Landry (Ian) and Charles Lewis III (a soldier who barges in at the midpoint and rejiggers the power relationship to Ian’s profound sorrow), deserve a ton of credit for their courageous participation. Plenty of actors would decline to ply their craft without the unquantifiable benefits of makeup, flattering lighting, convincing sound design, an elevated stage and a safety zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>De Whalley’s is the standout performance, largely because she elevates Cate beyond a sweet but helpless cliché into the only character in the play whose fate we invest in. She has that delicious talent of letting every emotion scurry across her face, appearing simultaneously shy and open. Landry doesn’t create a character so much as embody an attitude; his gruffness could stand some modulating gentleness to allow us to see what Cate once and still admires in Ian. Lewis is equally unafraid to be crude and unlikable, but he comes off as more of a symbol than a three-dimensional human being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kudos all around, though, to my fellow audience members, who understood quicker than I that we were part of the performance. At first, we’d all bustle out of the way like tourists or roaches to accommodate an actor’s path or movement, and to seek a better vantage point. But as Ian and Cate willfully ricocheted between the two rooms, we gradually gave up any pretense of being invisible and became blatant in our repositioning. (I daresay some of Mortimer and Davies-Crook’s direction is deviously intended to increase the audience’s activity, rather than to serve the action of the play). I all but laughed out loud when one theatergoer plopped on the side of the bed (taking care not to sit on a wet spot), shamelessly and splendidly erasing the division between the actors’ space and the audience’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve barely said a word about the content and themes of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b>, in part because they’re regrettably expressed without a great deal of power. The play unfolds during wartime, when the most heinous acts are necessary for survival. The original 1995 London production scandalously broached all sorts of taboos, provoking a blazing controversy among critics and audiences. In this staging, many awful things are described by the soldier, and several horrible bits are omitted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A caller on the room phone, once the audience is gathered and before Cate and Ian enter, cautions theatergoers who suffer from epilepsy or are uncomfortable with violence. Given the hoods and the diminutive suite, a warning might also be offered to those who suffer from claustrophobia. For everyone else, especially those of an adventurous or experimental bent, the reactions and emotions provoked by this one-of-a kind staging are well worth it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19:29’s production of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b> runs through June 29, 2008 at the Mosser Hotel, 54 Fourth St. (at Market). For \u003ca href=\"http://www.nineteentwentynine.co.uk/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit nineteentwentynine.co.uk\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The play’s the thing, a sage English playwright once wrote. With due respect to Sarah Kane’s brutal, ambiguous text, and the brave cast of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b>, the major reasons to check out the British theatre troupe 19:29’s production at the Hotel Mosser are the location and environment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The weirdness begins in the lobby, where the eight theatergoers privy to each performance are outfitted with black hoods cut out with eye and mouth holes. From the moment we boarded the elevator I dug being semi-anonymous, even during a steamy Thursday matinee, though I never quite grasped the point. Perhaps the hoods encourage the audience’s voyeuristic impulse, increasing our comfort level with a parade of (simulated) wankery, shagging, fellatio and buggery. Or maybe our masks were for the actors’ benefit, allowing them a hairsbreadth of distance during a 90-minute piece that unfolds in incredible (and occasionally fleeting comic) proximity in a cramped, two-room suite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We shuffled awkwardly around the suite, noting the double bed in one room and the gin and couch in the other, until Ian and Cate entered. We deduced they were the actors, for they weren’t wearing hoods. He’s a boozing, prematurely gray journalist; she’s a young blonde waif who, we learn, was once his girlfriend. \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b> quickly shapes up as a tense, claustrophobic but familiar power play, with Cate fending off the husky Ian’s sexual advances. To add even more menace and mystery, Ian displays his gun, which he carries to fend off some threat lurking in the streets below, or perhaps to end his own nihilistic existence in this nondescript hotel room.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are obvious advantages to having the audience precede the actors into the suite, but there’s one major negative: It felt as if they had to stake out and claim the space from us. Had the actors already been in the room and in mid-conversation when we arrived, our discomfort at invading their privacy — and, eventually, witnessing their extreme vulnerability — would have been heightened.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Heightened, however, to a point that might well have been intolerable. Directors Felix Mortimer and Susanna Davies-Crook have settled on an awkward middle ground that bows to American mainstream sensibilities and protects the actors, but undercuts the premise of both the play and its hyper-intimate staging. While I have no great need to observe strangers five or seven feet away performing sexual acts — call me a pervert — it rings false to simulate such acts with the audience looking over the actors’ shoulders. You can’t go halfway without risking looking ridiculous, and losing your grip on the paying customers\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That said, Stephanie Jane de Whalley (who I gather to be the only British member of the cast, and a veteran of 19:29’s Leeds production), and American thespians Thomas Landry (Ian) and Charles Lewis III (a soldier who barges in at the midpoint and rejiggers the power relationship to Ian’s profound sorrow), deserve a ton of credit for their courageous participation. Plenty of actors would decline to ply their craft without the unquantifiable benefits of makeup, flattering lighting, convincing sound design, an elevated stage and a safety zone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>De Whalley’s is the standout performance, largely because she elevates Cate beyond a sweet but helpless cliché into the only character in the play whose fate we invest in. She has that delicious talent of letting every emotion scurry across her face, appearing simultaneously shy and open. Landry doesn’t create a character so much as embody an attitude; his gruffness could stand some modulating gentleness to allow us to see what Cate once and still admires in Ian. Lewis is equally unafraid to be crude and unlikable, but he comes off as more of a symbol than a three-dimensional human being.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kudos all around, though, to my fellow audience members, who understood quicker than I that we were part of the performance. At first, we’d all bustle out of the way like tourists or roaches to accommodate an actor’s path or movement, and to seek a better vantage point. But as Ian and Cate willfully ricocheted between the two rooms, we gradually gave up any pretense of being invisible and became blatant in our repositioning. (I daresay some of Mortimer and Davies-Crook’s direction is deviously intended to increase the audience’s activity, rather than to serve the action of the play). I all but laughed out loud when one theatergoer plopped on the side of the bed (taking care not to sit on a wet spot), shamelessly and splendidly erasing the division between the actors’ space and the audience’s.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I’ve barely said a word about the content and themes of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b>, in part because they’re regrettably expressed without a great deal of power. The play unfolds during wartime, when the most heinous acts are necessary for survival. The original 1995 London production scandalously broached all sorts of taboos, provoking a blazing controversy among critics and audiences. In this staging, many awful things are described by the soldier, and several horrible bits are omitted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A caller on the room phone, once the audience is gathered and before Cate and Ian enter, cautions theatergoers who suffer from epilepsy or are uncomfortable with violence. Given the hoods and the diminutive suite, a warning might also be offered to those who suffer from claustrophobia. For everyone else, especially those of an adventurous or experimental bent, the reactions and emotions provoked by this one-of-a kind staging are well worth it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>19:29’s production of \u003cb>Blasted\u003c/b> runs through June 29, 2008 at the Mosser Hotel, 54 Fourth St. (at Market). For \u003ca href=\"http://www.nineteentwentynine.co.uk/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit nineteentwentynine.co.uk\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The title design for American Conservatory Theatre’s \u003cb>Tis Pity She’s A Whore\u003c/b> includes a bloody sword. It’s a warning to the squeamish, you may want to cover your eyes before the play’s horrific climax.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But then you’d miss \u003cb>Tis Pity\u003c/b>‘s extraordinary take on \u003cb>Romeo and Juliet\u003c/b> plus incest. And that would be a shame. Playwright John Ford tells his tale like a 17th-century take on Freudian drama, then packs it with plot twists, pulp romance, soap opera, swordfights and stabbings, and vaudeville slapstick. Director Carey Perloff keeps this stew boiling fiercely for 2 hours and 45 minutes, and tosses in a live score provided by composer and cellist Bonfire Madigan Shive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Ford wrote after Shakespeare and was among the last of the Jacobeans, staging plays just before the English Civil War shuttered all theatres. Director Carey Perloff (ACT’s Artistic Director) says she was intrigued by the society \u003cb>Tis Pity\u003c/b> presents, one where civil, clerical and moral authority have broken down. But she doesn’t miss the lurid story that delivers the message.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Parma, Annabella (Rene Augeson, an ACT core member) is besieged by suitors, good prospects and ludicrous. But she loses her heart to her brother Giovanni (Tony Award-winner Michael Hayden — what a hottie). Ford gives Giovanni a passionately eloquent love soliloquy. It’s so wrong, but he makes it sound so right.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ford is a master of the 17th-century pick-up line. Annabella succumbs to Giovanni with the words, “Thou hast won the field and never fought.” It’s the Jacobean equivalent of “You had me at hello.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ford makes heroes of these lovers, even as we know they’re doomed. And Director Perloff makes it easy to fall for them. She lights them from below as if they’re angels, as brother and sister make love on a lightbox of a bed. (But it’s so wrong!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two are no match, though, for the schemes of the servant Vasquez, played brilliantly by Anthony Fusco. He insures that the spirited sword play and sexual romps of Act 1 are followed by poisoned daggers and bloody vengeance in Act 2.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bonfire Madigan Shive hums and plays her cello throughout from a platform hovering above the stage. This Bay Area art music explorer, a kind of Laurie Anderson with strings, accompanies the lovers with singing tones that turn queasier and more manic as the drama proceeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Perloff has a weakness for melodrama. And the play’s action sometimes teeters into parody. But it’s a guilty pleasure. Almost everything works to boost the emotional and sexual temperature in this hothouse play. Only the set, by Walt Spangler, seems over the top. He’s designed a bizarre orgy of stylesm building a kind of church out of industrial stairways, organ pipes, and what look like curtains of Christmas ball ornaments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perloff and playwright Ford finish \u003cb>Tis Pity She’s A Whore\u003c/b> with a strong feminist slant and a sharp attack on clerical authority. But in the end, audiences may not retrain much of those themes. They’ll be left too breathless by the bloody way Ford concludes his lover’s tale of murder and suicide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tis Pity She’s a Whore\u003c/b> runs through July 6, 2008. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/tispity/index.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act=sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ford makes heroes of these lovers, even as we know they’re doomed. And Director Perloff makes it easy to fall for them. She lights them from below as if they’re angels, as brother and sister make love on a lightbox of a bed. (But it’s so wrong!)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The two are no match, though, for the schemes of the servant Vasquez, played brilliantly by Anthony Fusco. He insures that the spirited sword play and sexual romps of Act 1 are followed by poisoned daggers and bloody vengeance in Act 2.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bonfire Madigan Shive hums and plays her cello throughout from a platform hovering above the stage. This Bay Area art music explorer, a kind of Laurie Anderson with strings, accompanies the lovers with singing tones that turn queasier and more manic as the drama proceeds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director Perloff has a weakness for melodrama. And the play’s action sometimes teeters into parody. But it’s a guilty pleasure. Almost everything works to boost the emotional and sexual temperature in this hothouse play. Only the set, by Walt Spangler, seems over the top. He’s designed a bizarre orgy of stylesm building a kind of church out of industrial stairways, organ pipes, and what look like curtains of Christmas ball ornaments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Perloff and playwright Ford finish \u003cb>Tis Pity She’s A Whore\u003c/b> with a strong feminist slant and a sharp attack on clerical authority. But in the end, audiences may not retrain much of those themes. They’ll be left too breathless by the bloody way Ford concludes his lover’s tale of murder and suicide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Tis Pity She’s a Whore\u003c/b> runs through July 6, 2008. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.act-sf.org/tispity/index.html\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit act=sf.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Opera lovers have long wondered about the fuss over Tolkien’s \u003cb>The Lord of the Rings\u003c/b>. Almost a century earlier, Richard Wagner wrote four epic operas in which he told the story of a golden ring that grants great power, but corrupts all who wear it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now audiences in San Francisco can see if Francesca Zambello’s American-themed \u003cb>Ring of the Nibelung\u003c/b> is worth all the fuss.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Tuesday, the San Francisco Opera premiered Zambello’s first installment, \u003cb>Das Rheingold\u003c/b>, part one of the four-part cycle. The singing was mostly wonderful, but it’s not clear yet, whether Zambello can meld American themes to Wagner’s version of Norse and Germanic myth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some ideas connect brilliantly. The dwarf Alberich, the Nibelung, comes on stage dressed like a California 49er, toting a pan and pickaxe. The three Rhinemaidens wear girdles and bloomers, like dance hall girls, as they guard their golden hoard in a landscape that seems equal parts Ansel Adams and Albert Bierstadt. Later Alberich guards his treasure at the bottom of a mine, cracking his whip to drive a crew of child miners.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wotan, chief of the gods, dresses like an industrial magnate, in an office that seems vaguely Art Deco, though the spear seems an odd touch for the boardroom. He’s willing to sacrifice his sister-in-law, Freia, and his honor, if he can trick the giants into building his fortress Valhalla (or are they laying the foundations for an American empire?). The giants (and they really are giants — great costumes by Catherine Zuber) are ironworkers. They make their entrance seated on a steel I-beam, descending from a sky filled with cranes and girders. But Freia’s brothers, Donner and Froh, come off as idle playboys, bearing croquet mallets. They’re more Oscar Wilde than Sinclair Lewis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s not clear what Roger Hartley, the production designer, has in mind when he projects a planetarium slideshow on a scrim during Wagner’s long, darkly lush overture. I loved the shot of Saturn and its rings, but I’m baffled at how it serves Zambello’s American theme. Projections of boiling clouds and trippy light shows follow during scene changes to equally spectacular but puzzling effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if the metaphor doesn’t hang together, the opera cooks along, despite its two hour 35 minute running time, without intermission (as tradition demands). Give lots of credit for that to Zambello’s smart direction and the cast’s fine performances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baritone Richard Paul Fink steals the show as Alberich, combining potent singing with a brilliant physical perfomance that must be exhausting. Tenor Stefan Margita sings the part of Loge with effortless command of the stage. He plays the trickster god as a political fixer with oily assurance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Larmore brings a silky tone to the role of Fricka, Wotan’s wife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Catherine Cangiano, Lauren McNeese and Buffy Baggott (all making their San Francisco Opera debut) are a very sexy trio as the Rhinemaidens, teasing Alberich with their lusty promises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baritone and former Adler fellow, Mark Delavan, seemed stiff and unsure in his debut in the central role of Wotan. But he hits all his notes, and may relax into the part for future performances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conductor Donald Runnicles holds it all together from the pit, never flagging despite the heavy lifting demanded by Wagner’s rich score.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe Zambello will clarify her American themes as the \u003cb>Ring\u003c/b> cycle continues. The company presents \u003cb>Die Walkuere\u003c/b> (or Walküre) in 2010, and the entire cycle in 2011. \u003cb>Das Rheingold\u003c/b>‘s final scene presents Wotan and the other gods climbing the rainbow bridge to their fortress in Valhalla. The bridge, however, looks more like the gangplank of a ship. If Zambello can’t make this work, we may remember the scene as the gods boarding the Titanic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Das Rheingold\u003c/b> runs through June 28, 2008 at the San Francisco Opera. For \u003ca href=\"http://sfopera.com/opera.asp?o=258\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit sfopera.com.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it’s not clear what Roger Hartley, the production designer, has in mind when he projects a planetarium slideshow on a scrim during Wagner’s long, darkly lush overture. I loved the shot of Saturn and its rings, but I’m baffled at how it serves Zambello’s American theme. Projections of boiling clouds and trippy light shows follow during scene changes to equally spectacular but puzzling effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, if the metaphor doesn’t hang together, the opera cooks along, despite its two hour 35 minute running time, without intermission (as tradition demands). Give lots of credit for that to Zambello’s smart direction and the cast’s fine performances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baritone Richard Paul Fink steals the show as Alberich, combining potent singing with a brilliant physical perfomance that must be exhausting. Tenor Stefan Margita sings the part of Loge with effortless command of the stage. He plays the trickster god as a political fixer with oily assurance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jennifer Larmore brings a silky tone to the role of Fricka, Wotan’s wife.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Catherine Cangiano, Lauren McNeese and Buffy Baggott (all making their San Francisco Opera debut) are a very sexy trio as the Rhinemaidens, teasing Alberich with their lusty promises.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Baritone and former Adler fellow, Mark Delavan, seemed stiff and unsure in his debut in the central role of Wotan. But he hits all his notes, and may relax into the part for future performances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Conductor Donald Runnicles holds it all together from the pit, never flagging despite the heavy lifting demanded by Wagner’s rich score.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Maybe Zambello will clarify her American themes as the \u003cb>Ring\u003c/b> cycle continues. The company presents \u003cb>Die Walkuere\u003c/b> (or Walküre) in 2010, and the entire cycle in 2011. \u003cb>Das Rheingold\u003c/b>‘s final scene presents Wotan and the other gods climbing the rainbow bridge to their fortress in Valhalla. The bridge, however, looks more like the gangplank of a ship. If Zambello can’t make this work, we may remember the scene as the gods boarding the Titanic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Das Rheingold\u003c/b> runs through June 28, 2008 at the San Francisco Opera. For \u003ca href=\"http://sfopera.com/opera.asp?o=258\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit sfopera.com.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The tone of theatre Q’s production of \u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b> by Moisès Kaufman, which runs through June 22 at Palo Alto’s Dragon Theatre, is set even before the play begins. As the actors take the monochromatic stage, blank books stacked in piles and strewn about on tables, we are informed by one actor after another that there will be a 15-minute intermission, that snacks and drinks are available in the lobby for a dollar, and, yes, that it would be very nice, indeed, if we could all please turn off our cell phones. For the next couple of hours, the actors share narration duties in the same sort of way, as they collectively weave the story of Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace in the spring of 1895.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That February, Wilde had two popular plays running simultaneously in London’s West End, including \u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b>, which, coincidentally, runs through June 21 at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos (\u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/index.jsp?id=22815\">see review\u003c/a>). By the end of May \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> had been shut down, Wilde’s property had been seized and auctioned, and Wilde himself would be in prison for the crime of gratifying himself sexually with other males.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kaufman uses trial transcripts, news accounts of the day, letters, biographies, and memoirs as source material for his intelligent and engaging play. As actors recite these texts, sometimes interrupting one another, the experience is less like attending an evening of dramatic theater — although there are certainly dramatic moments — than a fascinating lecture by not one but nine intensely captivating speakers. Thanks in no small part to director George Quick’s creative hand and smart choices for his actors, it was one of the most compelling evenings of theater I’ve experienced in a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play’s central theme concerns art and morality, specifically, whether art must be moral in order to be considered art at all. The mores of the time argued that it must be so, but Wilde places the notion of art and the human impulse to make, take pleasure in, and admire beauty above the dull and hypocritical strictures of British society. No book can be immoral, he testifies, if it is well written. Bad writing is the greater crime. Style trumping content, we might huff today, but Wilde appears to have sincerely believed that beauty and pleasure were immensely valuable aspects of life. If it feels good, he might have said had he been born in 1960’s London, when the laws that imprisoned him were finally overturned, do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Four narrators take us through the events of the spring of 1895 and a few years thereafter (prison was too much for Wilde; he died on November 30, 1900). At various points in the play, Matthew Lowe, Kevin Hsieh, Thomas Azar, and Patrick Hilt are judge, jury, George Bernard Shaw, and four young men brought before the court to confess their sexual liaisons with Wilde (three do). Presented to us as opportunistic naughty boys in black stockings, shorts, and suspenders, their salacious presence is meant to make us struggle with the play’s other central theme: the morality of the artist himself, whose arrogant belief that he could lie in court about his affairs strikes today’s theatergoer as hopelessly naive. He must have been one of those elites we keep hearing about in the current political contest, who thought the rules didn’t apply to him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the center of the piece is John T. Aney as Oscar Wilde. Aney plays Wilde for all he’s worth, his mocking condescension and easy self confidence flooding over us in Act I, his broken despair kicking us in the guts in Act II. Aney is terrific, and he’s supported by the equally watchable Michael Moerman, whose Queensbury fairly spits with fury at the thought of this horrible, immoral man consorting with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose steely love for Wilde is disquietingly self-righteous in the hands of Scott Ludwig.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Balancing the three protagonists is Kevin Copps, who is wonderful as Wilde’s skilful-but-pragmatic attorney, and Frederik Goris, who is sympathetic and engaging as Queensbury’s first defender. The back and forth between Aney’s Wilde and Goris’s Carson is one of the many high points of the piece. In one scene, Wilde’s self confidence gets the best of him, causing him to mistake the patient Carson for a chum he could confide in. Alas for Oscar Wilde, open court turned out not to be a very good place for the truth, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b> runs at theatre Q through June 22, 2008. 535 Alma Street, Palo Alto. Tickets are $15-$25. For \u003ca href=\"http://tix.theatrebayarea.org/ticketing/showdates.php?domain=BOOTH&s_id=588'\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatrebayarea.org or call 415-433-1235.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The tone of theatre Q’s production of \u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b> by Moisès Kaufman, which runs through June 22 at Palo Alto’s Dragon Theatre, is set even before the play begins. As the actors take the monochromatic stage, blank books stacked in piles and strewn about on tables, we are informed by one actor after another that there will be a 15-minute intermission, that snacks and drinks are available in the lobby for a dollar, and, yes, that it would be very nice, indeed, if we could all please turn off our cell phones. For the next couple of hours, the actors share narration duties in the same sort of way, as they collectively weave the story of Oscar Wilde’s fall from grace in the spring of 1895.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That February, Wilde had two popular plays running simultaneously in London’s West End, including \u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b>, which, coincidentally, runs through June 21 at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos (\u003ca href=\"http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/index.jsp?id=22815\">see review\u003c/a>). By the end of May \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> had been shut down, Wilde’s property had been seized and auctioned, and Wilde himself would be in prison for the crime of gratifying himself sexually with other males.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kaufman uses trial transcripts, news accounts of the day, letters, biographies, and memoirs as source material for his intelligent and engaging play. As actors recite these texts, sometimes interrupting one another, the experience is less like attending an evening of dramatic theater — although there are certainly dramatic moments — than a fascinating lecture by not one but nine intensely captivating speakers. Thanks in no small part to director George Quick’s creative hand and smart choices for his actors, it was one of the most compelling evenings of theater I’ve experienced in a long time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The play’s central theme concerns art and morality, specifically, whether art must be moral in order to be considered art at all. The mores of the time argued that it must be so, but Wilde places the notion of art and the human impulse to make, take pleasure in, and admire beauty above the dull and hypocritical strictures of British society. No book can be immoral, he testifies, if it is well written. Bad writing is the greater crime. Style trumping content, we might huff today, but Wilde appears to have sincerely believed that beauty and pleasure were immensely valuable aspects of life. If it feels good, he might have said had he been born in 1960’s London, when the laws that imprisoned him were finally overturned, do it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Four narrators take us through the events of the spring of 1895 and a few years thereafter (prison was too much for Wilde; he died on November 30, 1900). At various points in the play, Matthew Lowe, Kevin Hsieh, Thomas Azar, and Patrick Hilt are judge, jury, George Bernard Shaw, and four young men brought before the court to confess their sexual liaisons with Wilde (three do). Presented to us as opportunistic naughty boys in black stockings, shorts, and suspenders, their salacious presence is meant to make us struggle with the play’s other central theme: the morality of the artist himself, whose arrogant belief that he could lie in court about his affairs strikes today’s theatergoer as hopelessly naive. He must have been one of those elites we keep hearing about in the current political contest, who thought the rules didn’t apply to him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the center of the piece is John T. Aney as Oscar Wilde. Aney plays Wilde for all he’s worth, his mocking condescension and easy self confidence flooding over us in Act I, his broken despair kicking us in the guts in Act II. Aney is terrific, and he’s supported by the equally watchable Michael Moerman, whose Queensbury fairly spits with fury at the thought of this horrible, immoral man consorting with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, whose steely love for Wilde is disquietingly self-righteous in the hands of Scott Ludwig.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Balancing the three protagonists is Kevin Copps, who is wonderful as Wilde’s skilful-but-pragmatic attorney, and Frederik Goris, who is sympathetic and engaging as Queensbury’s first defender. The back and forth between Aney’s Wilde and Goris’s Carson is one of the many high points of the piece. In one scene, Wilde’s self confidence gets the best of him, causing him to mistake the patient Carson for a chum he could confide in. Alas for Oscar Wilde, open court turned out not to be a very good place for the truth, either.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b> runs at theatre Q through June 22, 2008. 535 Alma Street, Palo Alto. Tickets are $15-$25. For \u003ca href=\"http://tix.theatrebayarea.org/ticketing/showdates.php?domain=BOOTH&s_id=588'\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatrebayarea.org or call 415-433-1235.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>It’s Oscar Wilde season on the peninsula, thanks to overlapping performances of Wilde’s \u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b>, though June 21, 2008 at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos, and theatre Q’s production of \u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b>, by Moises Kaufman, May 31 through June 22, 2008, at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto. I’ve decided to see them both and report back on what’s what.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilde’s last play,\u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b> opened in London on Valentine’s Day in 1895. Just a little more than three months later, Wilde’s three trials would be over and he would be in prison for “gross indecency” (the formal charge for being a homosexual, which was then illegal in England).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You would never know that the play being performed at Bus Barn was written by a man whose reputation — for his time, anyway — was so notorious. Despite its clever dialogue, appealingly jaundiced world view, and embrace of the absurd used to mock the rituals of high society and the wealthy, \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> seems a creaky bit of theater in 2008. It’s populated by privileged young men falling in love with costumed younger women they barely know. To insure the requisite level of on-stage antics and confusion, each man has invented a fake friend or brother to perpetuate flimsy deceptions used to woo and/or delude their female prey. The audience can see their exposure coming a mile away. In short, the play is silly, charming, fluff. Apparently \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> is riddled with inside jokes and references that the keen 1895 theatergoer might have pieced together to discern Wilde’s sexuality and private life. But in 2008, it is only one actor’s uncontrollable appetite for cucumber sandwiches that raises an eyebrow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A visible lack of said sandwiches is actually one of the many problems with the current Bus Barn production — for the record, we are told that a fresh supply of cucumber sandwiches has just been made special for a guest, but there are so few of them on the prop serving plate that when the host devours the lot of them, we can’t discern any difference in the size of the non-existent pile, which effectively kills the gag. Sandwiches aside, the play suffers from uninspired direction, melodramatic acting, implausible costumes, and a general lethargy that undermines what should be a hilarious, raucous, bawdy, and irreverent farce. My recollection is that the actors tended to stand around a lot, invariably planting themselves in pairs at the edge of the stage to recite their lines, which Wilde wrote as dialogue, directly to the audience. Ugh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is Wilde, so words gallop to our rescue time and again. The fun begins with the play’s first two lines, when Algernon (an overwrought Jeff Clarke, whose performance teeters on parody), rises from his piano bench and asks his butler (John Baldwin, channeling Droopy Dog) “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir” is Lane’s dry-as-dust reply. Presumably the Lane character was being sincere, if ironic, about the expectations of his position and place in society at the close of the 19th century. But in the current context, in which no creative outburst is too minor to merit its own blog or YouTube video, Lane’s inattentiveness and lack of interest is refreshing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the play’s chief appeals is Wilde’s decision to put his observations on life and art into the mouths of numerous characters, rather than just one. Thus, early on, after Earnest (terrifically played by John Romano) chides Algernon for reading the inscription on his cigarette case, Algernon replies that “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.” Other Wilde-isms are delivered by the imperious Lady Bracknell (a stoic, bombastic Wendy Howard-Benham, whose clown makeup must have been intentional but looked for all the world like a terrible mistake). “I’m sorry if we are a little late, Algernon, but I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered [wait for it]; she looks quite twenty years younger.” The object of Earnest’s affections delivers her share of doozies, too. Distraught by her mother, Lady Bracknell’s, refusal to consent to her marriage to Earnest, Gwendolen (Shannon Stowe, who is doomed to intone her lines from within not one but two unflattering costumes) sagely notes that “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarah Cook as Cecily has both. She takes her character seriously, inhabiting it with authenticity and wit. Romano’s Earnest, whose importance literally lies in his name, does the same, perhaps because it’s also his job to be Wilde’s self-deprecating conscience. When Algernon tries to get deep with “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his,” Earnest mockingly asks “Is that clever?” When assured by Algernon that it is, Earnest laments, “I am sick to death of cleverness… I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b> runs at Bus Barn Stage Company through June 21, 2008. 97 Hillview Avenue, Los Altos. Tickets are $22-$32. For \u003ca href=\"http://http://busbarn.tix.com/Schedule.asp?ActCode=27208\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit busbarn.tix.com or call 650-941-0551.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>It’s Oscar Wilde season on the peninsula, thanks to overlapping performances of Wilde’s \u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b>, though June 21, 2008 at Bus Barn Stage Company in Los Altos, and theatre Q’s production of \u003cb>Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde\u003c/b>, by Moises Kaufman, May 31 through June 22, 2008, at the Dragon Theatre in Palo Alto. I’ve decided to see them both and report back on what’s what.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilde’s last play,\u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b> opened in London on Valentine’s Day in 1895. Just a little more than three months later, Wilde’s three trials would be over and he would be in prison for “gross indecency” (the formal charge for being a homosexual, which was then illegal in England).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You would never know that the play being performed at Bus Barn was written by a man whose reputation — for his time, anyway — was so notorious. Despite its clever dialogue, appealingly jaundiced world view, and embrace of the absurd used to mock the rituals of high society and the wealthy, \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> seems a creaky bit of theater in 2008. It’s populated by privileged young men falling in love with costumed younger women they barely know. To insure the requisite level of on-stage antics and confusion, each man has invented a fake friend or brother to perpetuate flimsy deceptions used to woo and/or delude their female prey. The audience can see their exposure coming a mile away. In short, the play is silly, charming, fluff. Apparently \u003cb>Earnest\u003c/b> is riddled with inside jokes and references that the keen 1895 theatergoer might have pieced together to discern Wilde’s sexuality and private life. But in 2008, it is only one actor’s uncontrollable appetite for cucumber sandwiches that raises an eyebrow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A visible lack of said sandwiches is actually one of the many problems with the current Bus Barn production — for the record, we are told that a fresh supply of cucumber sandwiches has just been made special for a guest, but there are so few of them on the prop serving plate that when the host devours the lot of them, we can’t discern any difference in the size of the non-existent pile, which effectively kills the gag. Sandwiches aside, the play suffers from uninspired direction, melodramatic acting, implausible costumes, and a general lethargy that undermines what should be a hilarious, raucous, bawdy, and irreverent farce. My recollection is that the actors tended to stand around a lot, invariably planting themselves in pairs at the edge of the stage to recite their lines, which Wilde wrote as dialogue, directly to the audience. Ugh.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this is Wilde, so words gallop to our rescue time and again. The fun begins with the play’s first two lines, when Algernon (an overwrought Jeff Clarke, whose performance teeters on parody), rises from his piano bench and asks his butler (John Baldwin, channeling Droopy Dog) “Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?” “I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir” is Lane’s dry-as-dust reply. Presumably the Lane character was being sincere, if ironic, about the expectations of his position and place in society at the close of the 19th century. But in the current context, in which no creative outburst is too minor to merit its own blog or YouTube video, Lane’s inattentiveness and lack of interest is refreshing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the play’s chief appeals is Wilde’s decision to put his observations on life and art into the mouths of numerous characters, rather than just one. Thus, early on, after Earnest (terrifically played by John Romano) chides Algernon for reading the inscription on his cigarette case, Algernon replies that “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.” Other Wilde-isms are delivered by the imperious Lady Bracknell (a stoic, bombastic Wendy Howard-Benham, whose clown makeup must have been intentional but looked for all the world like a terrible mistake). “I’m sorry if we are a little late, Algernon, but I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn’t been there since her poor husband’s death. I never saw a woman so altered [wait for it]; she looks quite twenty years younger.” The object of Earnest’s affections delivers her share of doozies, too. Distraught by her mother, Lady Bracknell’s, refusal to consent to her marriage to Earnest, Gwendolen (Shannon Stowe, who is doomed to intone her lines from within not one but two unflattering costumes) sagely notes that “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sarah Cook as Cecily has both. She takes her character seriously, inhabiting it with authenticity and wit. Romano’s Earnest, whose importance literally lies in his name, does the same, perhaps because it’s also his job to be Wilde’s self-deprecating conscience. When Algernon tries to get deep with “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his,” Earnest mockingly asks “Is that clever?” When assured by Algernon that it is, Earnest laments, “I am sick to death of cleverness… I wish to goodness we had a few fools left.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>The Importance of Being Earnest\u003c/b> runs at Bus Barn Stage Company through June 21, 2008. 97 Hillview Avenue, Los Altos. Tickets are $22-$32. For \u003ca href=\"http://http://busbarn.tix.com/Schedule.asp?ActCode=27208\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and information\u003c/a> visit busbarn.tix.com or call 650-941-0551.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Everyone is reading at the beginning of \u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b>, Jane Austen’s posthumously published commentary on late-18th-century Gothic novels, adapted for the stage by Pear Avenue Theatre artistic director, Diane Tasca. Gentlemen in top hats strut across the Pear’s small space, their long noses pressed deep into their books. Young girls cluster and titter, discussing a delicious intrigue or plot twist that they, as privileged readers, have just shared. And as these characters read silently to themselves or pretend to chat with each other, other actors read aloud to the audience, reciting selected passages from Austen’s book so that we might share in the story of Catherine Morland, a girl from a small town in southern England, who, at 15, is described by her loving, supportive, but praise-stingy parents as being “almost pretty.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Catherine, who is brought to life by Annamarie MacLeod, is a classic, guileless, Austen heroine. Naïve but intelligent, prone to errors in judgment but always well intentioned, and determined almost to the point of Polyanna, Catherine is the prototypical young girl learning the ways of the adult world. As the play opens, these lessons are taking place in Bath, where she falls for a dashing, well-spoken, and, most importantly, well-read young man named Henry Tilney (meticulously rendered by Michael Barrett Austin). The story might have ended there, with Catherine living happily ever after, but Austen creates mischief for her heroine by introducing her to Isabella Thorpe (Melissa Quine), who is a bit older and thus a lot wiser in the eyes of young, impressionable Catherine. As it turns out, Catherine’s new BFF doesn’t always have Catherine’s best interests at heart (Quine imbues her character with such duplicity, we worry for Isabella’s soul in the afterlife). Meanwhile, Isabella’s boorish brother John (played broadly and brashly by William J. Brown III), who has domineering designs of his own on young Catherine, is an outright cad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the play, the audience is treated to energetic, physical performances by the actors that go far beyond mere blocking. At times, the cast is called upon to dance, speaking their lines as they twirl, lock elbows, and promenade. Indeed, the entire play feels like a work of choreography, which makes it a delight to the eye. For example, instead of simply having a pair of actors stand and deliver their assigned lines of narration, director Ennals has those actors sweep into view in animated conversation as they stride across the stage. Even when they break the wall to turn to the audience and confide Tasca’s carefully selected plot points and insights, they stay in motion, giving the play a pace that keeps it and the story moving briskly along (a good thing, too, since the \u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b> runs 2 hours and 15 minutes, plus an intermission).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I won’t spoil the plot twists or the ending for you, although it’s not that difficult to guess where things are headed and which lessons our feisty heroine is destined to learn the hard way. You’ll also see right away that the costumes by Trish Files are terrific. And the actors, most of whom play double, triple, and quadruple roles (sometimes as animals, occasionally as furniture), are uniformly great. In addition to MacLeod, whose young-girl-with-an-old-soul persona is pretty much irresistible, Katie O’Bryon bounces easily between the camp of Mrs. Thorpe and the utter sincerity and kindness of Eleanor Tilney. Martin Gagen plays his old-authority-figure roles to perfection, except when he’s playing a horse, for which he gamely gets on his hands and knees to inject a bit of slapstick into the proceedings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stars of the show, though, are Austen’s words, and the way in which Ennals has chosen to frame and illuminate them. It’s the little things, like having one character speak the words “The most charming girl in the world” while the object of this tribute, Catherine, mouths the words to the audience, unable to contain her excitement at being so described, and needing to share it with someone, anyone, even a room full of strangers sitting in the dark. Our ears prick up when Catherine confides her hopes for the “horrid” pleasures that hopefully await at the Tilney’s home, Northanger Abbey, where she imagines she might press open a secret passage and find herself face to face with “some injured and ill-fated nun.” Even in the scene in which Gagen plays the horse, Ennals and Tasca prove to be good collaborators; no sooner have we begun grinning at this deliberately silly image than we realize that the actors are discoursing on the four-legged beast of burden. Gagen gets the incongruity of having to fill a horse’s iron shoes as Austen’s lovely language and rich sentiments swirl around him. If the performances of the actors are like watching a dance, hearing them speak Austen’s words is like listening to music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b> runs at The Pear Avenue Theatre through June 8, 2008. 1220 Pear Avenue, Mountain View. Performances are Thursdays – Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm. Tickets are $12-$25. To order, go to \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/6698\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Brown Paper Tickets,\u003c/a> or call 650-254-1148.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Everyone is reading at the beginning of \u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b>, Jane Austen’s posthumously published commentary on late-18th-century Gothic novels, adapted for the stage by Pear Avenue Theatre artistic director, Diane Tasca. Gentlemen in top hats strut across the Pear’s small space, their long noses pressed deep into their books. Young girls cluster and titter, discussing a delicious intrigue or plot twist that they, as privileged readers, have just shared. And as these characters read silently to themselves or pretend to chat with each other, other actors read aloud to the audience, reciting selected passages from Austen’s book so that we might share in the story of Catherine Morland, a girl from a small town in southern England, who, at 15, is described by her loving, supportive, but praise-stingy parents as being “almost pretty.” \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Catherine, who is brought to life by Annamarie MacLeod, is a classic, guileless, Austen heroine. Naïve but intelligent, prone to errors in judgment but always well intentioned, and determined almost to the point of Polyanna, Catherine is the prototypical young girl learning the ways of the adult world. As the play opens, these lessons are taking place in Bath, where she falls for a dashing, well-spoken, and, most importantly, well-read young man named Henry Tilney (meticulously rendered by Michael Barrett Austin). The story might have ended there, with Catherine living happily ever after, but Austen creates mischief for her heroine by introducing her to Isabella Thorpe (Melissa Quine), who is a bit older and thus a lot wiser in the eyes of young, impressionable Catherine. As it turns out, Catherine’s new BFF doesn’t always have Catherine’s best interests at heart (Quine imbues her character with such duplicity, we worry for Isabella’s soul in the afterlife). Meanwhile, Isabella’s boorish brother John (played broadly and brashly by William J. Brown III), who has domineering designs of his own on young Catherine, is an outright cad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the play, the audience is treated to energetic, physical performances by the actors that go far beyond mere blocking. At times, the cast is called upon to dance, speaking their lines as they twirl, lock elbows, and promenade. Indeed, the entire play feels like a work of choreography, which makes it a delight to the eye. For example, instead of simply having a pair of actors stand and deliver their assigned lines of narration, director Ennals has those actors sweep into view in animated conversation as they stride across the stage. Even when they break the wall to turn to the audience and confide Tasca’s carefully selected plot points and insights, they stay in motion, giving the play a pace that keeps it and the story moving briskly along (a good thing, too, since the \u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b> runs 2 hours and 15 minutes, plus an intermission).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I won’t spoil the plot twists or the ending for you, although it’s not that difficult to guess where things are headed and which lessons our feisty heroine is destined to learn the hard way. You’ll also see right away that the costumes by Trish Files are terrific. And the actors, most of whom play double, triple, and quadruple roles (sometimes as animals, occasionally as furniture), are uniformly great. In addition to MacLeod, whose young-girl-with-an-old-soul persona is pretty much irresistible, Katie O’Bryon bounces easily between the camp of Mrs. Thorpe and the utter sincerity and kindness of Eleanor Tilney. Martin Gagen plays his old-authority-figure roles to perfection, except when he’s playing a horse, for which he gamely gets on his hands and knees to inject a bit of slapstick into the proceedings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The stars of the show, though, are Austen’s words, and the way in which Ennals has chosen to frame and illuminate them. It’s the little things, like having one character speak the words “The most charming girl in the world” while the object of this tribute, Catherine, mouths the words to the audience, unable to contain her excitement at being so described, and needing to share it with someone, anyone, even a room full of strangers sitting in the dark. Our ears prick up when Catherine confides her hopes for the “horrid” pleasures that hopefully await at the Tilney’s home, Northanger Abbey, where she imagines she might press open a secret passage and find herself face to face with “some injured and ill-fated nun.” Even in the scene in which Gagen plays the horse, Ennals and Tasca prove to be good collaborators; no sooner have we begun grinning at this deliberately silly image than we realize that the actors are discoursing on the four-legged beast of burden. Gagen gets the incongruity of having to fill a horse’s iron shoes as Austen’s lovely language and rich sentiments swirl around him. If the performances of the actors are like watching a dance, hearing them speak Austen’s words is like listening to music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Northanger Abbey\u003c/b> runs at The Pear Avenue Theatre through June 8, 2008. 1220 Pear Avenue, Mountain View. Performances are Thursdays – Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 2pm. Tickets are $12-$25. To order, go to \u003ca href=\"http://www.brownpapertickets.com/producer/6698\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">Brown Paper Tickets,\u003c/a> or call 650-254-1148.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Duke Ellington’s \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is often described as an opera, yet with its zany plot and combination of spoken dialogue, musical numbers, and dance pieces it defies easy classification. \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> was unfinished when Ellington died, and the Oakland Opera Theater has taken on the task of restoring and supplementing the work. It is an ambitious project; according to the program notes, Ellington completed roughly 95% of the melodies and lyrics, 25% of a piano score, and no orchestration, leaving a great deal to be done in order to prepare the piece for a fully staged production. While the finished product is sometimes disjointed, this unique production has wonderful music and moments of great energy, and it succeeds in bringing this little-known work to a wider audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is loosely based on the life of Madam C. J. Walker, an African American woman who became the first female self-made millionaire by developing and selling hair care and beauty products. The opera opens in Harlem, where Queenie Pie’s ten-year reign as top Beautician-Cosmetologist is threatened by newcomer Café Olay. After Café Olay seduces and then kills Queenie Pie’s lover, Queenie Pie leaves New York to journey to an island in search of a plant that will allow her to make the best beauty products available. There are several twists and turns along this journey including a shipwreck, a marriage with island royalty, and Queenie Pie’s discovery that she can make anything she wants on the island. In the end, she must choose between the riches that she has discovered and her desire to return home to New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the plot, which moves in fits and starts, isn’t what gives this work its energy and appeal. Instead the opera is driven by Ellington’s swinging melodies and the lively orchestration by arranger Marc Bolin, all brought beautifully to life by the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra. Their playing is a constant pleasure, providing everything from rollicking dance numbers to scene-setting background music to impressionistic storm sounds. If at times the onstage action becomes confusing, you can always sit back and enjoy the band.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Queenie Pie, Amanda King brings a commanding stage presence and great physical humor to the role. Her voice is expressive and it’s unfortunate that the role doesn’t give her more opportunities to show it off. Kathleen Antonia is a sultry and confident Café Olay. Tania Johnson gives a particularly strong performance as the singing, dancing, and narrating Lady Reporter/Observator. The male ensemble in Act II also stands out for their beautifully coordinated a cappella singing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellington originally conceived of \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> in collaboration with public television station WNET in New York and it was meant to air on television. To stay true to that original intent, Oakland Opera Theater has framed the piece as if it were a live studio production, with sung “commercials” supplemented by video throughout the performance. While these interludes are well-performed by the Studio Singers, they stop the action and slow the momentum onstage. Overall the production could use tightening, with quicker transitions and fewer pauses so that the audience isn’t pulled out of the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellington laid the groundwork for \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b>, but for the work to be completed and performed many artists needed to collaborate on the final product. It’s exciting to see a local company bringing together so many talented people on this unique and challenging project, giving audiences an opportunity to see this rarely performed work by one of the great masters of jazz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is at the Oakland Metro Operahouse through May 25, 2008. The Oakland Metro Operahouse is located at 630 3rd Street in Oakland. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.oaklandopera.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and more information\u003c/a> visit oaklandopera.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Duke Ellington’s \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is often described as an opera, yet with its zany plot and combination of spoken dialogue, musical numbers, and dance pieces it defies easy classification. \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> was unfinished when Ellington died, and the Oakland Opera Theater has taken on the task of restoring and supplementing the work. It is an ambitious project; according to the program notes, Ellington completed roughly 95% of the melodies and lyrics, 25% of a piano score, and no orchestration, leaving a great deal to be done in order to prepare the piece for a fully staged production. While the finished product is sometimes disjointed, this unique production has wonderful music and moments of great energy, and it succeeds in bringing this little-known work to a wider audience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is loosely based on the life of Madam C. J. Walker, an African American woman who became the first female self-made millionaire by developing and selling hair care and beauty products. The opera opens in Harlem, where Queenie Pie’s ten-year reign as top Beautician-Cosmetologist is threatened by newcomer Café Olay. After Café Olay seduces and then kills Queenie Pie’s lover, Queenie Pie leaves New York to journey to an island in search of a plant that will allow her to make the best beauty products available. There are several twists and turns along this journey including a shipwreck, a marriage with island royalty, and Queenie Pie’s discovery that she can make anything she wants on the island. In the end, she must choose between the riches that she has discovered and her desire to return home to New York.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the plot, which moves in fits and starts, isn’t what gives this work its energy and appeal. Instead the opera is driven by Ellington’s swinging melodies and the lively orchestration by arranger Marc Bolin, all brought beautifully to life by the Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra. Their playing is a constant pleasure, providing everything from rollicking dance numbers to scene-setting background music to impressionistic storm sounds. If at times the onstage action becomes confusing, you can always sit back and enjoy the band.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As Queenie Pie, Amanda King brings a commanding stage presence and great physical humor to the role. Her voice is expressive and it’s unfortunate that the role doesn’t give her more opportunities to show it off. Kathleen Antonia is a sultry and confident Café Olay. Tania Johnson gives a particularly strong performance as the singing, dancing, and narrating Lady Reporter/Observator. The male ensemble in Act II also stands out for their beautifully coordinated a cappella singing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellington originally conceived of \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> in collaboration with public television station WNET in New York and it was meant to air on television. To stay true to that original intent, Oakland Opera Theater has framed the piece as if it were a live studio production, with sung “commercials” supplemented by video throughout the performance. While these interludes are well-performed by the Studio Singers, they stop the action and slow the momentum onstage. Overall the production could use tightening, with quicker transitions and fewer pauses so that the audience isn’t pulled out of the story.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellington laid the groundwork for \u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b>, but for the work to be completed and performed many artists needed to collaborate on the final product. It’s exciting to see a local company bringing together so many talented people on this unique and challenging project, giving audiences an opportunity to see this rarely performed work by one of the great masters of jazz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>Queenie Pie\u003c/b> is at the Oakland Metro Operahouse through May 25, 2008. The Oakland Metro Operahouse is located at 630 3rd Street in Oakland. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.oaklandopera.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\">tickets and more information\u003c/a> visit oaklandopera.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "TheatreWorks' Caroline, or Change",
"headTitle": "TheatreWorks’ Caroline, or Change | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Change and loss are the parallel themes of the closing production of TheatreWorks’ 2007/2008 season, \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> now playing at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The musical’s heroine, Caroline Thibodeaux, brilliantly realized by C. Kelly Wright, is coping with both the loss of an abusive spouse and the stirrings of a growing daughter who refuses to remain a child. Across town, a young boy named Noah Gellman, played with confidence and maturity beyond his years by Julian Hornik, a peninsula middle-school student, has recently lost his mother to cancer. And in the society at large, the events of one particular day in late November, 1963, are about to turn a nation’s guts inside out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not coincidentally, it is the actual change in Noah’s pockets, and Caroline’s interaction with said ducats as the black maid doing laundry in a white, Jewish boy’s basement, that provides the turning point in playwright Tony Kushner’s oddly tin-eared story. Caroline is incomprehensibly angry with her lot in life (“I wish every afternoon I’d die,” she wails), from her economic oppression to her longing for the lips of Nat King Cole. Nevertheless, she has a strong bond with Noah (“He’s so shy, a hug could break him”), based in part on her willingness to let him light the occasional cigarette for her, and her practice of returning all of the loose change she finds in the boy’s dirty clothes. Noah’s carelessly accounted coins mean little to him, but to Caroline they would be enough to switch from serving her own growing boys meat-flavored bread, as she calls it, to real ground chuck. Caroline only makes $30 a week, but honesty and honor compel her to return each and every coin to young Noah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Noah’s basement is Caroline’s domain throughout much of the musical, which to my ear sounded more like an opera and, in some sections, the mono-tonal arrangements that are familiar to anyone who has attended a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. (Jeanine Tesori’s mostly unhummable tunes also draw from sources as varied as Detroit soul, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and eastern European klezmer.) In the basement, the washing machine transforms into a hip-swishing apparition, delightfully brought to life by Allison Blackwell (she’s great here, and even better as Caroline’s forward-thinking friend, Dotty). The dryer is personified by a devilish baritone in black and red, inhabited all too briefly for my liking by James Monroe Iglehart (“Time has come,” he roars, “to suffer heat!”). Caroline is also kept company by a radio, which is represented, Greek-chorus style, by a trio of women in red sequins (Marsha Lawson, Adrienne Muller, and Dawn L. Troupe, all of whom belt out some serious solos).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inserting herself into Caroline’s world is Noah’s stepmother, Rose, keenly played by Eileen Tepper. Rose is a relentless pain in the ass who manages her life, and the lives of others, by drawing endless numbers of arbitrary lines in the sand. The management of the coins in young Noah’s pockets is one such line, although the lesson Rose wants to teach him has less to do with capitalism and the value of a dollar (Randy Nazarian is terrific as Rose’s card-carrying Commie dad) than giving the lad a taste of the liberal guilt Rose believes he should feel by putting poor, poor Caroline in the position of coming across his loose change on laundry day. Naturally Rose makes things even worse by decreeing that anything Caroline finds in Noah’s pockets is hers to keep, thus upsetting the moral balance between a motherless child and his unlikely surrogate mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The animation of inanimate objects in the basement is one of the most engaging aspects of \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b>, which may be why the moon’s appearance is one of the few staging disappointments. Anise Ritchie handles her numbers beautifully and regally, but her immobile presence stands in stark contrast to the rest of the production, which benefits from quick set changes in which elements are mixed and matched as the story’s circumstances demand. Poor moon just stands there, all dressed up with nowhere to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More troubling, though, than a relatively minor detail like an immobile moon is the tone of Kushner’s piece, which teeters on condescending. Not surprisingly given his personal history (Kushner describes \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> as “A mis-memory play”), he gets the New York Jews transplanted in Louisiana absolutely right, but he doesn’t have as much success capturing the inner life and external reality of Caroline and her kin. Yes, Kushner gives Caroline some very good lines to sing, and Wright does an amazing job of expressing Caroline’s angry, bitter, and tender sides, sometimes all in the same breath and sideways glance. But we never see the cause of Caroline’s catharsis as the musical draws to a close. Kushner’s calculated excuse of “mis-memory” only takes one so far.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lesson here is probably as simple as that old saw about writing what you know. We see, for example, a lot of the interior of the Gellman home: there’s Noah’s upstairs bedroom, his father’s music nook, the dining room, the kitchen, and, of course, the basement. We even get a revealing window on the ambivalence some Jews felt toward “Negroes” in 1963: Noah’s paternal grandparents can accept the ones in Louisiana because they don’t stir up trouble like those in Alabama and Mississippi, whereas Rose’s father believes Martin Luther King is not radical enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when the action shifts to Caroline’s home, we aren’t permitted past the front porch. It’s as if Kushner simply could not imagine it. He’s no better at getting inside the heads of some of his characters. Take Caroline’s daughter, Emmie, whose infectious smile and terrific voice belong to Valisia LeKae. What’s the driving motivation for her social conscience and radicalism? According to Kushner, it appears to be materialism. I don’t mean to suggest that tangible goods and the pleasures they provide are poor motivators, or that economic justice was not a part of the greater cause, but the civil rights movement was also about a person’s right to vote and sit where they liked on a public bus. Kushner’s Caroline is conveniently practical, more absorbed by her daily economic circumstances than the injustices done to her because of her race. Kushner is equally practical: he’d rather tell us a bedtime story about the change in a white boy’s pocket than the more complicated tale of how change finally touched Caroline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TheatreWorks’ production of \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> continues at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts through April 27, 2008. 500 Castro Street, (650) 903-6000. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatreworks.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\"> tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatreworks.org.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Change and loss are the parallel themes of the closing production of TheatreWorks’ 2007/2008 season, \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> now playing at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The musical’s heroine, Caroline Thibodeaux, brilliantly realized by C. Kelly Wright, is coping with both the loss of an abusive spouse and the stirrings of a growing daughter who refuses to remain a child. Across town, a young boy named Noah Gellman, played with confidence and maturity beyond his years by Julian Hornik, a peninsula middle-school student, has recently lost his mother to cancer. And in the society at large, the events of one particular day in late November, 1963, are about to turn a nation’s guts inside out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not coincidentally, it is the actual change in Noah’s pockets, and Caroline’s interaction with said ducats as the black maid doing laundry in a white, Jewish boy’s basement, that provides the turning point in playwright Tony Kushner’s oddly tin-eared story. Caroline is incomprehensibly angry with her lot in life (“I wish every afternoon I’d die,” she wails), from her economic oppression to her longing for the lips of Nat King Cole. Nevertheless, she has a strong bond with Noah (“He’s so shy, a hug could break him”), based in part on her willingness to let him light the occasional cigarette for her, and her practice of returning all of the loose change she finds in the boy’s dirty clothes. Noah’s carelessly accounted coins mean little to him, but to Caroline they would be enough to switch from serving her own growing boys meat-flavored bread, as she calls it, to real ground chuck. Caroline only makes $30 a week, but honesty and honor compel her to return each and every coin to young Noah.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Noah’s basement is Caroline’s domain throughout much of the musical, which to my ear sounded more like an opera and, in some sections, the mono-tonal arrangements that are familiar to anyone who has attended a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. (Jeanine Tesori’s mostly unhummable tunes also draw from sources as varied as Detroit soul, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and eastern European klezmer.) In the basement, the washing machine transforms into a hip-swishing apparition, delightfully brought to life by Allison Blackwell (she’s great here, and even better as Caroline’s forward-thinking friend, Dotty). The dryer is personified by a devilish baritone in black and red, inhabited all too briefly for my liking by James Monroe Iglehart (“Time has come,” he roars, “to suffer heat!”). Caroline is also kept company by a radio, which is represented, Greek-chorus style, by a trio of women in red sequins (Marsha Lawson, Adrienne Muller, and Dawn L. Troupe, all of whom belt out some serious solos).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Inserting herself into Caroline’s world is Noah’s stepmother, Rose, keenly played by Eileen Tepper. Rose is a relentless pain in the ass who manages her life, and the lives of others, by drawing endless numbers of arbitrary lines in the sand. The management of the coins in young Noah’s pockets is one such line, although the lesson Rose wants to teach him has less to do with capitalism and the value of a dollar (Randy Nazarian is terrific as Rose’s card-carrying Commie dad) than giving the lad a taste of the liberal guilt Rose believes he should feel by putting poor, poor Caroline in the position of coming across his loose change on laundry day. Naturally Rose makes things even worse by decreeing that anything Caroline finds in Noah’s pockets is hers to keep, thus upsetting the moral balance between a motherless child and his unlikely surrogate mom.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The animation of inanimate objects in the basement is one of the most engaging aspects of \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b>, which may be why the moon’s appearance is one of the few staging disappointments. Anise Ritchie handles her numbers beautifully and regally, but her immobile presence stands in stark contrast to the rest of the production, which benefits from quick set changes in which elements are mixed and matched as the story’s circumstances demand. Poor moon just stands there, all dressed up with nowhere to go.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More troubling, though, than a relatively minor detail like an immobile moon is the tone of Kushner’s piece, which teeters on condescending. Not surprisingly given his personal history (Kushner describes \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> as “A mis-memory play”), he gets the New York Jews transplanted in Louisiana absolutely right, but he doesn’t have as much success capturing the inner life and external reality of Caroline and her kin. Yes, Kushner gives Caroline some very good lines to sing, and Wright does an amazing job of expressing Caroline’s angry, bitter, and tender sides, sometimes all in the same breath and sideways glance. But we never see the cause of Caroline’s catharsis as the musical draws to a close. Kushner’s calculated excuse of “mis-memory” only takes one so far.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lesson here is probably as simple as that old saw about writing what you know. We see, for example, a lot of the interior of the Gellman home: there’s Noah’s upstairs bedroom, his father’s music nook, the dining room, the kitchen, and, of course, the basement. We even get a revealing window on the ambivalence some Jews felt toward “Negroes” in 1963: Noah’s paternal grandparents can accept the ones in Louisiana because they don’t stir up trouble like those in Alabama and Mississippi, whereas Rose’s father believes Martin Luther King is not radical enough.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when the action shifts to Caroline’s home, we aren’t permitted past the front porch. It’s as if Kushner simply could not imagine it. He’s no better at getting inside the heads of some of his characters. Take Caroline’s daughter, Emmie, whose infectious smile and terrific voice belong to Valisia LeKae. What’s the driving motivation for her social conscience and radicalism? According to Kushner, it appears to be materialism. I don’t mean to suggest that tangible goods and the pleasures they provide are poor motivators, or that economic justice was not a part of the greater cause, but the civil rights movement was also about a person’s right to vote and sit where they liked on a public bus. Kushner’s Caroline is conveniently practical, more absorbed by her daily economic circumstances than the injustices done to her because of her race. Kushner is equally practical: he’d rather tell us a bedtime story about the change in a white boy’s pocket than the more complicated tale of how change finally touched Caroline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TheatreWorks’ production of \u003cb>Caroline, Or Change\u003c/b> continues at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts through April 27, 2008. 500 Castro Street, (650) 903-6000. For \u003ca href=\"http://www.theatreworks.org/\" target=\"offsite\" rel=\"noopener\"> tickets and information\u003c/a> visit theatreworks.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
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"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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"reveal": {
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"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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},
"rightnowish": {
"id": "rightnowish",
"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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},
"science-friday": {
"id": "science-friday",
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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"snap-judgment": {
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"title": "Snap Judgment",
"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
"info": "The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap's musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. This is storytelling... with a BEAT!! Snap first aired on public radio stations nationwide in July 2010. Today, Snap Judgment airs on over 450 public radio stations and is brought to the airwaves by KQED & PRX.",
"airtime": "SAT 1pm-2pm, 9pm-10pm",
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},
"soldout": {
"id": "soldout",
"title": "SOLD OUT: Rethinking Housing in America",
"tagline": "A new future for housing",
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