By Ande Jacobson
Life is theatre, and theatre is life. TheatreWorks opens its 2015/2016 season with the Northern California premiere of Donald Margulies’ Broadway hit, The Country House. The play is an homage to Chekhov’s The Seagull and Uncle Vanya with many parallels in character, setting, and subtext, modernized to current time. Margulies’ writing is witty and relatable, and it keeps the audience engaged, at times laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
West Side Story first hit the Broadway stage in 1957, and this famous musical, with book by Arthur Larents and music by Leonard Bernstein, gave the youthful lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, his Broadway debut. The show was groundbreaking, particularly for its explosive action, and it was nominated for six Tony Awards. While the show won for Best Choreography and Best Scenic Design, alas, it lost the Best Musical Award to Meredith Willson’s The Music Man. Most theatre or movie aficionados are familiar with the show, its plot bringing the classic story of Romeo and Juliet to the current era when it debuted. Today, its tale of the star-crossed lovers from opposite gangs forms a period piece, keeping the tension and angst of the time alive, and Broadway By The Bay’s production is one to be treasured. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, is Pear Avenue Theatre’s final production in its Pear Avenue performance space, and this is one not to be missed. The play is claimed by many in the critical community to be Stoppard’s finest, with timeless themes and witty dialog that will keep audiences enthralled from start to finish. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Foothill Music Theatre just opened their production of a rarely done, but arguably the most ethereal show in the Sondheim canon, Sunday in the Park with George – a musical based on the Georges Seurat painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The painting is surreal, an example of Seurat’s Pointillism technique that was a vivid departure from the approach used by the impressionists of his time. Pointillism is essentially a mosaic of complementary colors that, when viewed at a distance, causes the brain to fuse the colors and register a complex color, such as seeing violet emerge when only blue and red are actually painted. Likewise, this first collaboration between composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim and playwright and director James Lapine whisks the audience members into a surreal world of color and light worthy of Seurat. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Build, by Michael Golamco, is enjoying its Northern California premiere at City Lights Theater Company. In his previous career, Golamco was a software developer, but now he’s a veteran writer for stage and screen. He is currently one of the staff writers for the television show Grimm, though unlike Grimm, there aren’t any monsters in Build. The play is rife with storytelling and technology, and the script presented City Lights with several significant challenges. Fortunately director Lisa Mallette and the rest of her creative staff were able to meet those challenges head-on. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
The Woman in Black, adapted by Stephen Mallatratt, is an impressive ghost story set in a small Victorian theatre and currently haunts the Dragon stage. Susan Hill’s 1983 horror novella of the same name was the source for this stage version, a play that has been running in London’s West End since 1989. It’s tough to tell an effective ghost story on stage, but this one is riveting. The plot follows Arthur Kipps, a man haunted by a terrible secret from early in his career as a London solicitor. He hires an actor to help him reenact the events that have haunted him so his family and friends will finally understand the horror that he’s been living with. Then he hopes he can bury the past and move on with his life. Sounds simple, right? Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Could the earth be overtaken by invaders from Mars? On October 30, 1938 a lot of people thought so when the Mercury Theatre on the Air presented a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. The broadcast took the form of a series of radio news reports, many on location as the invasion was supposedly taking place. Even with the disclaimer at the beginning of the broadcast that what followed was a fictional story, widespread panic ensued, in part because many listeners didn’t tune in at the top of the hour and missed the announcement. They were late because they had been listening to the Charlie McCarthy Show on a rival network, but that was in 1938. In the summer of 2014, Stanford Repertory Theater continues its Orson Welles festival with a must-see, fully staged version of this famous radio play. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Few would argue that the primary purpose of language is communication. Still, there is a vast difference between transmission and reception between two people even when they ostensibly speak the same language. City Lights Theater Company’s current production of Julia Cho’s play, The Language Archive, takes a compelling look at the language of love vs. the love of language. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
Hillbarn’s final show of its 73rd season is The Color Purple, based on Alice Walker’s novel of the same name. The story winds its way through the bruises and beauty that life has to offer a poor black woman living in the Southern US from 1909-1945. This production is packed with emotion and power, and yes, plenty of purple.
Walker’s most famous work has enjoyed success in many forms making its debut in 1982 and becoming a Pulitzer Prize winning novel in 1983. The Steven Spielberg film adaptation followed soon thereafter. Finally, the musical adaptation (with book by Marsha Norman, and music and lyrics by Brenda Russell, Allee Willis, and Stephen Bray) hit the Broadway stage in 2005. Continue reading
By Ande Jacobson
In the fall of 2012, A Good Reed Review published a commentary entitled “The role of the pit musician in musical theatre”. The article discussed the unique role pit musicians play along with some of the challenges they face. Part of that discussion focused on some of the differences between being a pit musician versus a cast member. While I am a pit musician and musical director (normally the reason for periodic breaks from publishing theatre reviews), last fall, a different opportunity presented itself. For a change of pace, I climbed out of the pit and onto the stage as a cast member in West Valley Light Opera’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, an experience which confirmed, amplified and expanded upon much of the discussion in my previous commentary. Continue reading
