Theater
| Review |
Before his appearance at this weekend’s Steinbeck Festival, Gavin Cologne-Brookes, Professor of American Literature at Bath Spa University, expounded on Steinbeck.
In your presentation, Home is Where the Heart Is, what will you highlight/extract about the relationship between Steinbeck and Salinas? I’ll be talking about Steinbeck’s simultaneous ambivalence toward his hometown and celebration of it and ...
Home Word
A more streamlined festival still offers plenty of entry into the work and life of John Steinbeck.
The opening night barbecue of the Steinbeck Festival will occupy a stunning setting at the Big Sur Land Trust property Mark’s Ranch. It will include food from Oldtown Deli’s Gordon Chin and live music by ...
Booked Up
John Steinbeck Library hosts a panel of eight local authors talking about the writing life.
WEB SPECIAL: Full interview with James B. Golden Monterey County is teeming with published authors and poets. They convene in writers’ clubs like the Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium and the Central Coast Writers Club. They ...
So Wright
Steven Wright has made a name as one of the most original comedians in the game.
Steven Wright scored a Grammy nod for Best Comedy Album in both 1985 and 2007, won an Oscar in 1989 for Best Short Live-Action Film (he co-wrote and starred in The Appointments of Dennis Jennings), ...
The Surge
The National Steinbeck Center has a big couple of months heading this way.
The Steinbeck Center is a nucleus of culture in Salinas, a reflection of its city’s evolving histories and essential values. In the next few months, the Steinbeck Center will host a plethora of events and ...
Revolutionary Violin
Tim Fain returns to Monterey County with a live multimedia show with a message.
Violinist Tim Fain is one of those young classical music stars who connects genres and mediums and generations, like a sort-of conduit, an emulsifier, a portal. Fittingly, Portals is the name of his new multimedia ...
Sneaky Funny
A.J. Jamal unloads wicked physical comedy and impressions on Planet Gemini.
Comedian A.J. Jamal, originally from Cleveland but now stomping around Hollywood and beyond, came up in the same Cleveland comedy scene that gave us Arsenio Hall, Drew Carey and Steve Harvey (Bob Hope and Tim ...
Fetching Ideology
Lee Blessing’s Drama Desk Award-nominated Chesapeake explores the art of politics and the politics of art.
In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts funded an exhibition by artist Andres Serrano that included his infamous photograph “Piss Christ,” which earned the condemnation of Rev. Donald Wildmon and his conservative American Family ...
Nifty Fifty
Classic arts powerhouse Hidden Valley Music Seminars – long standing but little known – starts to celebrate a half century with La Boheme.
Despite its long existence in a pastoral field off Carmel Valley Road, backdropped by the Santa Lucia foothills and surrounded by white oak trees, music training and performance center Hidden Valley Music Seminars, for many ...
Mommy Made Me
Pulitzer-nominated Now That’s She’s Gone brings Ellen Snortland to Cherry Center.
Ellen Snortland describes her one-woman show as less Mommy Dearest than “Dear Mommy.” It’s a fair evaluation. Her 2008 Pulitzer Prize-nominated play Now That She’s Gone is a memoir that doubles as a chronicle of ...
Cranky Cat
Comedian and car lover Adam Carolla brings his sarcastic shtick to Carmel’s Sunset Center.
Adam “Ace” Carolla is a funny man who comes from a family that didn’t seem like it would produce a funny person. “There was nothing going on around the house,” he says in his laconic, ...
Fade to White
Blue-collar comedy bad-boy Ron White totes scotch and surprising sensitivity to Salinas.
Those who know comic Ron White only by his irreverent venting, incredulous cussing and insistent scotch and cigar smoke might be surprised to discover his sensitive side. “I have feelings too,” he tweeted the other ...
Words Have Power
Academy award-winning Dustin Lance Black returns to support the local premiere of his artistic activism with 8.
Four years ago, the most heated contest in the November elections in California – after Obama-Biden v. McCain-Palin – was over these 14 words: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or ...
Read Me a Story
A delightful cocktail of live actors and great stories mix together for a night of literary fun.
The “Selected Shorts” crew pack up their knickerbockers, leaving their home in New York City for a quick West Coast tour. On Saturday, March 31, they stop in Carmel to perform at the Sunset Center. ...
Designed to Inspire
Western Stage’s SpringFEST sizzles with courageous historical content.
Last summer, Hartnell College’s Western Stage launched the innovative, young and awkwardly named 2x4BASH theater company and lined up a daring, fast and fun run of four plays aimed at a younger-than-usual demographic. Western Stage ...
Rolling Rivers
Comedy legend, icon and rabble rouser Joan Rivers stays on the top of her game – and refuses to slow down.
Joan Rivers saves all the daily planners she’s used over the years. She refers to a full schedule as “happiness” and despises days when the only thing on tap is a 4:30pm gig in the ...
Tenacious D
Public Enemy energizer Chuck D visits CSU Monterey Bay, remains vigilant.
Chuck D’s rap group Public Enemy, celebrating its 25th year with a new album and world tour, was once feared – and vilified – for its angry political messages and sonic assault. They’ve since been ...
Laugh Happy
Paula Poundstone riffs on politics and people at Carmel’s Sunset Center.
Comedian Paula Poundstone dresses in the hip, androgynous shirts, slacks and ties of Diane Keaton in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. Except on Poundstone it’s not some chic New York thing as much as a reflection ...
So Dark, So Sedaris
As he returns to Carmel’s Sunset Center, David Sedaris only sharpens his commentary’s edge.
David Sedaris stirred up a ruckus this past July when he wrote an essay for The Guardian in which he scorched Chinese food and Chinese people’s sanitary habits. The piece sparked flurries of comments and ...
Method Man
Funnyman Howie Mandel riffs on comedy, his new show and OCD.
From St. Elsewhere and the voice of Gizmo in Gremlins to standup comedy and host of Deal or No Deal, Howie Mandel has tackled just about every facet of the entertainment biz. But at the ...
Going Places
From Hollywood to Egypt, the most-decorated Steinbeck Festival yet traverses diverse and verdant territory.
Take a big overriding theme, shoot it through the prism of John Steinbeck’s life and works, and refract it over several days in many different directions. That’s how the Steinbeck Festival goes down. It does ...
Stage Next
Big Sur’s children’s summer theater group again stands a beloved fairy tale on its head.
It’s the first of three consecutive Friday evening shows at the Big Sur Grange Hall and artistic director, Jaime Arze, to his own amazement, isn’t racing backstage and running up and down the stairs to ...
2x4 to the Head
Western Stage’s brave new “Theatre on the Edge” aims at young theater fans.
There was no big announcement, press release, leaks or fanfare. It just appeared. As if it had always been there. But Hartnell College Western Stage’s new theater group, 2x4Bash: Theatre on the Edge, set to ...
Free (For Real)
Seaside reclaims Juneteenth, an overlooked celebration of slavery’s actual end.
This Saturday, Star Social Club President Sharolyn Haulcy-Robinson is throwing a barbecue at Laguna Grande Park in Seaside. It’s an early commemoration of an obscure holiday known as Juneteenth which lands, this year, on Father’s ...
Good Grief
Ann Randolph’s Loveland takes on another tragic subject with ‘dirty hilarity.’
At age 18, Ann Randolph paid for college by working – and living – in Ohio’s Athens State Mental Hospital because they provided room and board. She took patients on road trips and wrote plays ...
Tidal Creativity
SpectorDance draws from the science to take on its most ambitious project yet: the sea.
The ocean, like fluid dancers’ bodies in motion, fascinates and soothes. It’s meditative and beautiful – on the surface. “We’re all struck by the beauty of the ocean, the mystery and the vast frontier, an ...
New Carmel Bay Players group presents a masterful 'Some Girl(s)' at Carl Cherry.
New Carmel Bay Players group presents a masterful 'Some Girl(s)' at Carl Cherry.
Playwright Neil LaBute gets labeled a misanthrope and a misogynist because he primarily writes about men who hate their fellow human beings or themselves, and hate or fear or hurt women. It’s probably a credit ...
Downtown Brown
Unearthing the lost tale of James Brown performing live in Monterey.
Back in January of 1979, soul and funk great James Brown walked onto a Monterey stage and began chanting, “I’m back.” Then the charismatic tuxedo-clad performer, who was already sweating like a boxer in the ...
Surreal Sunset
Three wildly diverse shows make for an epic weekend at Sunset Center.
A graceful trio balances violin, cello and piano melodies in G major. Next a raucous reincarnation of Queen’s Freddie Mercury dons an icy white suit and tears through “We Will Rock You.” Then aluminum-coated robots ...
Little Bite of the Big Apple
Local playwright Allston James debuts a short play in NYC’s Times Square.
Local Monterey playwright Allston James’ drama Duet in Platinum opened Friday, Jan. 21, at the Shell Theater/Times Square Arts Center in New York City, where it is enjoying a two-week run in a short plays ...
Bangin’ Tango
Luis Bravo and Cheryl Burke charge the wildly popular Forever Tango with culture and electricity.
Tango, born a hybrid in the barrios and bordellos of teeming, multi-cultural Argentina in the late 1800s, among European and Caribbean immigrants, Gypsies and native people, was once danced as a prelude to sex, equal ...
SoDA Pops
PacRep’s performing arts school picks up where CET left off.
Pacific Repertory Theatre’s School of Dramatic Arts (SoDA) is ready to debut a new program, Words on Stage: Voices from Great Literature, in the recently acquired Indoor Forest Theatre. A year-long creation of SoDA instructor/actress ...
Tuned Up
First Night Monterey’s 2010 strong music options ramp up an already incomparable local tradition.
It’s a quarter-to-three on Dec. 31 and you, your sweetie, and your three kids are at Macy’s Furniture at Del Monte Center, waiting for a shuttle bus. Your youngest son, 5, is dashing at nearby ...
Nick Hovick announces that Children's Experimental Theater is "dissolving."
Children's Experimental Theater, founded in 1960 by its longtime artistic director and matron, Marcia Gambrell Hovick, has recently been buffeted by a perfect storm of an ailing economy and the ailing health of key family ...
Cabin Fever
The Foreigner showcases Western Stage talent taking on goofy-fun script.
Poor Charlie. Here’s a sorry chap who’s unrepentantly unfaithful wife, though “dying” in a hospital room in England, wants only for him to go away to America for the weekend. And why? “Mary finds me ...
Steps Up
Capitol Steps bring bipartisan belly laughs to Sunset Center.
Think Beach Blanket Babylon, but trade ginormous intricate hats for some good wholesome political skewering and voilà: Capitol Steps. For newcomers, this keyboard-backed five-member cast tours the country sharing their brand of political satire. They ...
The Great Debate
MPC’s latest play ponders the definition of Art.
French playwright, novelist and screenwriter Yasmina Reza began her career as an actress. It was in 1987, however, that she revealed her supreme weapon – the pen. Her play, Conversations After a Burial, won her ...
Dramatic End
Exit Strategy helps locals and Compassionate Care Alliance navigate death.
In a polarized society where Jack Kevorkian is either a monster or a saint and Terry Shiavo was either murdered or allowed to die with rare dignity, it’s nice to have a little help making ...
Repo Dividends
Paper Wing’s adaptation of a cult musical film yields gory, campy fun.
The story goes that a friend’s bankruptcy repossession ordeal in the mid-’90s inspired Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich to write the dark and twisted musical Repo! The Genetic Opera, adapted into a 2008 cult film ...
Take a Bow
Ingrid Tower closes the curtain on Pacific Grove dance studio Shall We Dance
The e-mail from Shall We Dance founder Ingrid Tower arrived the night of Aug. 18 and began: "With great passion for all forms of movement arts and my love for partner dancing, I created Shall ...
Mighty Fine Art
The most ambitious West End Celebration yet draws Los Lobos to help salute the arts.
“There’s always so many different types of artists,” West End Celebration coordinator Deirdre Bascou says, “and there’s always something new.” To help commemorate host municipality Sand City’s 30th birthday, this year’s gathering certainly features different ...
Raising RENT
Gary Bolen directs the local premier of Jonathan Larson’s gritty mega-hit musical RENT.
The near-capacity audience that filled MPC’s Morgan Stock Stage theater last Friday was populated by an uncommon amount of young people. Their energy was evident in the hooting and cheering, the shouting of actors’ names ...
Child’s Play
The Forest Theater Guild’s Alice in Wonderland is a feast for the eyes, and the intellect.
Something happened during Forest Theater’s sumptuous production of Alice in Wonderland Saturday night – it split in two. One narrative is aimed squarely at kids; some of the characters are based on (and the story ...
Independence Thinking
Esalen and Big Sur Spirit Garden collaborate on a potent three-day festival.
To toast Independence Day, the Esalen International Arts Festival celebrates not one country, but the world’s 192 nations. The three-day explosion of arts, music and culture represents a typically unique approach for the Big Sur ...
Lust for Life
PacRep rolls up its sleeves in Sarah Ruhl’s romantic (and philosophical) comedy The Clean House.
Sarah Ruhl’s Pulitzer-nominated 2006 comedy The Clean House opens with monologues from its first three women – Brazilian transplant and newly arrived housemaid Matilde, her employer and successful doctor, Lane, and Lane’s kooky sister Virginia ...
Double Drama
Strong debuts for The Year of Magical Thinking and To Kill a Mockingbird.
“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem like a while ago but it won’t when it happens to you.” So begins Joan Didion’s one-woman play, The Year of Magical Thinking, adapted from her ...
Leaping Higher
Smuin Ballet steps up innovation and sensuality for its spring show at Sunset.
Their exquisitely defined muscles glisten against a dark backdrop. All six slice fencing foils through the air, slide them luxuriously along the stage floor, then flip them suddenly with the flick of a toe. Instead ...
Tough Call
Magic Circle’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is a busy circuit of weighty themes and modern complexity.
The set of Magic Circle Theatre’s production of Sarah Ruhl’s Dead Man’s Cell Phone is abstract, constructed of vertical panels painted with diagrams of what looks like the human ear and heart, book-ended by two ...
Dostoevsky Delivered
PacRep’s Crime and Punishment rewards the earnest audience member.
“Do you believe in Lazarus, rising from the dead?” Police Inspector Porfiry asks criminal suspect Raskolnikov during a lengthy and twisty interrogation. “Do you believe in God?” “Does it matter?” Raskolnikov replies. “It might,” Porfiry ...
Enlivening Legends
SpectorDance’s Heritage Project fuses cutting edge movement with vital local lore.
To the sound of a nostalgic yet dissonantly experimental bluegrass, four dancers reach, crouch and cringe at wild angles. Their denim dresses recall a time when farming was everyone’s way of life, but the hems, ...
More Drama
Magic Circle and November bring back the past powerfully.
Founder and artistic director Elsa Con’s Magic Circle Theatre is back – at its former 60-seat home in Carmel Valley Village tucked just off Carmel Valley Road – and it’s ready for action. And drama. ...
Iffy Ibsen
Staff Players take on An Enemy of the People.
The Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is considered a forefather of modern theater – specifically, “problem plays” that address moral, social or political issues – whose lineage reaches all the way to today’s modern plays, which have ...
Coming full circle, Magic Circle Theatre returns to Carmel Valley.
After a five-year absence, Magic Circle Theatre is set to reappear on the local theater scene with a season that kicks off next week with David Mamet's November, as reported by the Weekly, appropriately, last ...
Deep Digging
Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow hollows out Hollywood at Cherry Center.
David Mamet is all about dialogue – a broken-up dialogue of interruptions and unfinished sentences, repetition and leaps across loosely connected ideas. It’s tough-guy back-and-forth, bobbing and weaving with everything from intellectual razzle dazzle to ...
Stirring Shook
SoDA’s latest gives a young cast room to dance and sing.
Director Stephen Moorer describes Joe DiPietro’s All Shook Up as a hybrid of the skeletal structures of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and As You Like It, fleshed out with Kevin Bacon’s Footloose, and clothed in Elvis ...
Two Funny
Gabriel Iglesias and Eric Blake each unload a pair of comedy shows on Monterey County.
Rotund Mexican-American comedian Gabriel Iglesias does a clean act. If he swears, it’s rare, and in Spanish: a puta here, a pinche there. In short, the comedian can do funny without going into foul territory. ...
To the Letter
PacRep delivers a clever but cartoonish '25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.'
William Finn handled the music and lyrics and Rachel Sheinkin wrote the book (narrative) for this musical farce, which they adapted from Rebecca Feldman’s improvisational play, C-R-E-S-P-U-S-C-L-E. And it maintains strains of open-ended improv: Audience ...
Reclaiming Christmas
'La Pastorela' and 'Eight Reindeer' break through Christmas consumerism in dramatic – and dramatically different – ways.
The trite routine of Christmas accoutrements trotted out every year – Santa, shopping, carols, trees – can get tiresome. Thankfully, two unique theater companies are providing potent antidotes by staking out opposite ends of the ...
’Logue On
Carl Cherry Center’s 'Talk to Me' monologues surges on in its third year.
“Fleeting but meaningful flings,” they’re calling it. “They” are the creative minds behind Carl Cherry Center for the Arts (just “the Cherry” to friends), and “it” is this weekend’s Talk to Me monologues program: three ...
‘Scoobie Doo on Acid’
Zombie Voodoo Scream Party takes over Golden State for a freaky week of Halloween theater.
Rider McDowell grew up watching his mother rehearse off-Broadway plays from the wings of various New York theaters – and was bored to death by most of what he saw. “I hate off-Broadway shows. Theater ...
Dark Delight
Wry humorist David Sedaris hones his next book at Carmel’s Sunset Center.
David Sedaris’ dad has sniped that Sedaris reads aloud better than he writes. There’s something to that – the way he breathes his words to life, as he’s done on the David Letterman show, where ...
Think Pink
Paper Wing soars with multi-media rock opera The Wall: A Live Tribute.
Near the end of Paper Wing Theatre’s The Wall: A Live Tribute, Pink, a rock star on the edge of oblivion, begins roping his arm to shoot heroin while singing “Nobody Home.” After emptying the ...
Altered State
Warren Dewey steps down at Golden State Theatre, Monterey Church steps in.
The unexpected news this week that Warren Dewey is stepping down as proprietor of the Golden State Theatre and handing over the reins to the Monterey Church marked a sea change on the local entertainment ...
Oven Fresh
The Baker’s Wife has the Western Stage’s tight cast cooking.
Joseph Stein wrote the book and Stephen Schwartz wrote the lyrics and music to The Baker’s Wife, in many ways an archetypal Broadway musical – only the financially plagued 1976 work never made it to ...
Funny Feeling
Paula Poundstone returns to the Golden State in Monterey.
Paula Poundstone claims she doesn’t know how to use a computer, but she finds other ways to connect. She’s a national spokesperson for Friends of Libraries U.S.A., the first woman to win a Cable ACE ...
Broadway musical medley is rough-around-the-edges but redeeming.
The Bruce Ariss Wharf Theater’s Broadway visits 14 Broadway musicals, from Oklahoma! to Oliver!, with inventive vignettes, costume changes, one-man orchestra George Peterson, a versatile set and props, and a whole heap of enthusiasm. Where ...
Wanting More
PacRep’s Oliver! is a booming and ambitious summertime success.
Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist (full title: Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy’s Progress) chronicles the adventures of an orphan waif child trying to survive – and keep some semblance of morality – in the mean ...
High Lights
The Feast of Lanterns floods Pacific Grove with tradition, pageantry and leisure.
For 104 years, the Feast of Lanterns has consisted of two shows: the one that everybody sees and the one that goes on behind the scenes. Here, a look at both – from a former ...
Funny Money
Bankers Casino in Salinas launches live comedy with half of Kid ‘n’ Play.
Entertainment and gambling have a symbiotic relationship in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. So why not in Salinas? Recently, with the grand opening of a VIP Lounge and restaurant, Bankers Casino on Monterey Street in ...
Magnetic Bandit
Luis Valdez’s Bandido! rides into Carmel.
He was an aristocrat, a poet, a ladies’ man and a bandit. He was born in Monterey in 1835, before Alta California was ceded by Mexico to the U.S. after the U.S.-Mexican War (or the ...
Mod Improv
A first-of-its-kind class gets spontaneous in Monterey.
At the second class of Gerry Orton's beginner’s improv workshop at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, seven people of varying ages and occupations form a circle. Soon they start to toss around an imaginary ...
Company
Couples Therapy: MPC’s Company momentarily has its moments.
Dropped into a genre dominated by book musicals with traditional narratives and character developement like Hello, Dolly! and Camelot, with Stephen Sondheim/George Furth’s Company Company, the concept was the thing – not the story. When ...
Albee’s Damned
PacRep’s Woolf revival displays comedy, tragedy in classic take of marital woes.
There are moments in Michael Jacobs’ performance as George in the Pacific Repertory Theatre’s new production of Edward Albee’s groundbreaking play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which Jacobs seems not so much to stand ...
Acting Tough
A wave of exciting openings reveals the buoyancy of local theater troupes.
The incredible shrinking economy has infiltrated Monterey County theater: the Western Stage has scaled back; the mighty PacRep is going over line-item cuts; Forest Theatre Guild has “postponed” Annie and had to let their executive ...
White on Black
Steve White raps about Obama’s ethnicity and a hell of a lot more.
Over a comedy career that’s spanned 20-plus years, Steve White, formerly of Las Vegas and now settled in L.A., has appeared all over the comedy map – most recently in Japan. What was he doing ...
Labor Pains
A very timely Waiting for Lefty revival shines in Carmel.
“We got the blues – the 1935 blues,’’ Sid, a struggling taxi driver, tells his girlfriend by way of an explanation for why they should break up. The scene takes place in a revival of ...
Thighs and Whispers
Noche Flamenca unites dancers with Teatro Campesino comrades.
Martíne Santangelo’s remarkable career in flamenco got off to an ominous start. In the summer of 1989, the New York-bred actor was cast as a chorus member in Teatro Campesino’s Rose of the Rancho. “What ...
A Bittersweet Wake
Tragi-comic look at love and death is bold but disjointed.
You know those books you see where the author’s name is bigger than the title? The opening night of Falling: A Wake at the Carl Cherry Center was kind of like that. The production marked ...
One of a Kind
John Farmanesh-Bocca somehow executes an amazingly whirlwind This Wonderful Life.
Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is a holiday staple that reliably gets unpacked each year like a Christmas ornament. Its enduring optimism, masterful storytelling, endearing stock characters and iconic performance by Jimmy Stewart all ...
Ruhl of the Road
Western Stage constructs a droll portrait of emotional family clutter.
At one point in The Clean House at The Western Stage, a perfect, poised, pristine, professional woman in white and usually in control breaks down in front of the audience, crying and laughing at the ...
Bard to Be Wild
PacRep’s The Comedy of Errors delivers a deliciously ridiculous work befitting one of Shakespeare’s wackiest comedies.
A cornrow-coiffed Solinus, Duke of Ephesus, rolls onstage high atop a yellow airline staircase, leering, playing sax, sipping a toxic-green cocktail and wearing glam rock gold lamé and platform heels. This vision takes the edge ...
Hole Emotion
Rabbit Hole follows a path through potentially paralyzing grief.
It’s understandable if people cringe at the prospect of seeing Western Stage’s production of David Linsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole. Although it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was nominated for five Tonys, Ben Brantley ...
Unlimited Laughs
The S.F. Comedy Competition’s funniest punchlines came when the contestants pushed the boundaries.
The rules for the Annual San Francisco Comedy Competition state “no subject is taboo.” At last Friday’s 33rd annual edition of the competition at Golden State Theatre, the comedians would honor that rule again and ...
Heavy Lifting
MPC attacks obesity issues with Neil LaBute’s sharp and sassy Fat Pig.
Going to a Neil LaBute play is an invitation to be poked, tested, offended even. But bored… no. The evidence isn’t hard to find. Take, for instance, an office shark in LaBute’s film adaptation of ...
Good Sh*t, Sherlock
Western Stage’s version of the detective legend is high grade.
What 21st century citizen has not pondered the fate of the most famous Victorian detective, the greatest detective of all? You haven’t? Funny, nor have I. But no matter if you give not a whit, ...
Bordering on Genius
An innovative immigration tale as only El Teatro can tell it.
Mexican music sails out the doors as a line of people spills down the wooden porch of El Teatro Campesino in San Jaun Bautista. Two people working the box office pace nervously up and down ...
Bold Proposal
The Forest Theater Guild presents a brave portrayal of Evita.
Midway through the opening performance of the Forest Theater Guild's Evita, Michael Uribes has a breakthrough as Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara. During his first song, “Oh What a Circus,” he comes off a little stilted, ...
The Drama of Hate
Western Stage opens its 2008 season with The Laramie Project.
On the morning of Oct. 7, 1998, on the open prairie outside of Laramie, Wyo., 21-year-old Aaron Kreifels crashed his bike. When he picked himself up, he noticed what he first thought was a scarecrow ...
Raw Knowledge
Six Women give local theater a sassy kick in the ass.
Paper Wing Theatre reaffirms something specific with its latest production, the elaborately labeled Six Women with Brain Death, or Expiring Minds Want to Know – namely, that they have something precious and fresh to add ...
Funny Man for the Job
Brian Regan readies for his next major television special by playing the Golden State.
Brian Regan knows a cherry gig when he sees one. “I don’t know who’s writing books for babies,” he says during his recent Comedy Central special, “Brian Regan: Standing Up,” “but I want a piece ...
Hearty Winter Fare
PacRep’s The Full Monty satisfies theatergoers’ hunger for edgy, character-driven musical-comedy.
For years, a clipped-out BC Sunday comic was pinned to my office wall. In the drawing, one animal character slumps against a rock saying, “I’m going to turn this experience into a book about the ...
Wilde Times
Going on Ed Sullivan details a dynamic life dedicated to comedy.
Larry Wilde recalls an instance early on in his prolific career as an entertainer when he was the opening act for the Girlies Galore Strip Club in Eugene, Ore. “To get in [the club] you ...
Spinning a Universe
The Whirling Dervishes of Turkey tour for world understanding.
There is no counting. The people whirling around the floor aren’t dancing. They move in a simple, continuous motion. The left foot, planted solidly on the ground, pivots while the right propels the spinning movement ...
Funny Fluff
Gabriel Iglesias gets away with a lot by being fat and wearing Hawaiian.
Comedian Gabriel Iglesias is known primarily as the “Fluffy Man.” On his Hot and Fluffy DVD, Iglesias explains. “For the record, I’m not fat,” he says. “I’m fluffy. There are five levels of fatness. There’s ...
Thruppence Worth
Western Stage presents a convincing London underworld in Threepenny Opera.
A fair amount of flesh is involved in the all-out bawdy “I’m bad, very bad” version of The Threepenny Opera at the Western Stage. In the in-the-round closeness of the Studio Theater at Hartnell College, ...
Enchanted Evening
PacRep delivers a magical Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A giant moon glimmered at the elbow of a towering Monterey pine above the stage of the Outdoor Forest Theater on preview night of Pac Rep’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Oh, it was not a ...
Crown Cousins
Mary Stuart explores the complex relationship between two queens.
The pure notes of an Elizabethan canticle swell to quiet the chatter of an opening night crowd and fill the air with keen expectation. As the lights dim all eyes are drawn to the stage ...
Different Coarse
The Actors Collective explores the ribald one-act plays of Shel Silverstein.
While Shel Silverstein is best known for his classic children’s books such as The Missing Piece and The Giving Tree and his endlessly delightful volumes of poetry Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in ...
Mad Ambition
Macbeth begins the Carmel Shake-speare Festival with a nightmare in the round.
No question that the audience has been barraged by daily images of strife, noise and peril, embittered by governance that clasps to its chest every possible vestige of power, dulled by daytime television enactments of ...
Viva la Myth
Zoot Suit revives the spirit of El Pachuco.
A giant blade sliced through from behind the printed curtain hanging center-stage, through the large headlines—Los Angeles, 1943—through the hum of a bustling audience that filled the room as the second preview performance of >>Zoot ...
