Theater / Review
War Cry
One man channels a modern telling of an old tale of glory, tragedy and war at Circle Theatre.
After a Sunday afternoon matinee of Pacific Repertory Theatre’s opening season play, An Iliad, one of the PacRep people entreated audience members to tell others about the production, an extremely abridged one-man recounting of Homer’s ...
Jingle Hell
Tiny Stardust Playhouse does David Sedaris’ infamous take on Christmas.
For their holiday theater offering, Stardust Playhouse was going to do a play by Steve Tesich called The Speed of Darkness, which Stardust director and co-founder Kirstin Clapp describes as a family drama of a ...
Holy Hand Grenade
PacRep’s faithful take on Monty Python’s Spamalot musical is silly, clever and historical entertainment.
Monty Python is a comedy dynasty that seems destined to keep finding fresh converts to the team’s British, satirical, absurd and smart humor, beginning with their beloved and innovative BBC sketch comedy series Monty Python’s ...
Who Done Ate?
Saltshaker Theater’s murder/mystery performance pops up in an unlikely place for good (and probable) cause.
Saltshaker Theater’s doing dinner theater? That relic of the 1970s? Actually, the idea dates back to the Middle Ages, but established itself in the States in the 1950s and ’60s, and flourished as popular regional ...
Uneven Steps
September Shoes and its wimpy character development trip up Western Stage.
Playwright Jose Cruz Gonzalez seems like a good fit for Salinas, for Hartnell College and for Western Stage. He is a prolific Latino playwright who focuses especially on the lives of Mexicans in America, with ...
Animal Intensity
Edward Albee’s absurd The Zoo Story emerges well-acted and engaging at Stardust Playhouse
Simplicity is the key to Stardust Playhouse’s The Zoo Story. Armed with nothing more than a park bench, a few leaves and a crudely-painted backdrop of New York’s Central Park, the Monterey theater leaves the ...
Best Hell Ever
A family comes together and falls apart in Tracy Letts’ unmissable hit August: Osage County at Paper Wing.
Forget what you know about Paper Wing Theatre: their dark, gothic tendencies, their guerilla tactics, their sweet tooth for pop culture. With their production of Tracy Letts’ 2007 play August: Osage County, which won the ...
Fight Within a Fight
PacRep gives Yasmina Reza’s layered God of Carnage the depth it deserves.
French playwright Yasmina Reza has built an awesome career out of class struggle. The former actress-turned-playwright/author has won or been nominated for Moliere awards (the French Tonys), Laurence Olivier awards (the British Tonys) and actual ...
Silly Sourcery
The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!) gets ambitious with mixed results.
MPC Theater’s production of hodge-podge Broadway tribute/spoof The Musical of Musicals (The Musical!) is showing at The Bruce Ariss Wharf Theater, which is notable location for a couple of reasons. The Fisherman’s Wharf-based playhouse was ...
Reefer Madness burns with humor and depth.
Reefer Madness began life in 1936 as a cautionary film made by a church group about the dangers of “evil” marijuana, but its naivete marked it for satire. In the 1970s, it was picked up ...
Donuts’ Hole
Superior Donuts entertains despite a weakness: playing surprisingly predictable stereotypes.
Playwright and actor Tracy Letts marked himself as a playwright of force with the trangressive and trashy Killer Joe in 1993, and the crazy intensity of Bug in 1996. But Letts jumped up on the ...
Puppet Upgrade
Paper Wing’s racy, irreverent, Tony-winning Avenue Q does Sesame Street one better.
Racism has not been this funny since Chappelle’s Show. And not just racism, but homosexuality, urbanity, profanity and reality. As a result Avenue Q has deservedly won itself three Tonys with its zeitgeist-tapping, coming-of-age, musical ...
Long Struggle
The Adding Machine adds up to a strong lesson – finally.
The Studio Theater of Western Stage’s production of Elmer L. Rice’s The Adding Machine presents a curious case. The 1923 work is considered the first American expressionistic play. It followed the playwright’s financially successful first ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
‘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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
