Clik here to view.
Homeric Undone
After creating a propulsive contemporary take on George Orwell’s Animal Farm for Shotgun Players’ summer show last year, this summer writer-director Jon Tracy followed it up with The Salt Plays, Part...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Ten for Twenty-Ten
Here we are pretty much back where we started on this blog, with my Top Ten list of my favorite shows for the year. It was awfully hard to whittle the 126 shows I saw this year in the Bay Area down to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No One Expects the Russian Revolution
Shotgun Players’ 2008 premiere of Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage was such a resounding success—winning the Glickman Award for best play to premiere in the Bay Area that year—that it’s no wonder...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stages of Grief
It’s hard enough dealing with grief when you understand what happened, and why and how it happened, but when what’s happening to someone you love is completely incomprehensible, it’s mighty hard to get...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Dead on Arrival
THEATER REVIEW: BERKELEY Show #73: The Road to Hades, Shotgun Players, August 6. Ares (John Mercer) in a dress in in The Road to Hades. Photo by Jessica Palopoli. By Sam Hurwitt The Road to Hades looks...
View ArticleClik here to view.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Talking
What exactly is being communicated, and how is it different from what’s being said? For that matter, why’s it being said the way that it is? These questions underlie a lot of the conversations in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Blood Red, White and Blue
The presidential debates are upon us, Election Day is just a few weeks away, and two local theater companies are getting into the spirit of the thing by staging gleefully perverse musicals about the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Embarrassment of Riches
Boy, this was a hard year to reduce to a Top Ten. When I look over the list of the 117 shows I attended in 2012, eight strike me as shoo-ins for the list, and then there are fifteen other shows vying...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Talk and Talk and Talk About a Revolution
Shotgun Players is taking on The Coast of Utopia,Tom Stoppard’s mammoth trilogy about the budding Russian intellectual life of the mid-19th century, planting seeds for the revolution that will come...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Bonnie and Clyde’s Barn Dance Jamboree
Bank-robbing couple Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow have been objects of popular fascination since their heyday of the 1930s—a sexy young couple whose crime sprees were blown up into folklore even while...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Here an Antigone, There an Antigone
Three Bay Area companies adapt the same Greek tragedy at the same time. Read all about it in my Theatre Bay Area magazine feature. Elissa Beth Stebbins and Madeline H. D. Brown work on Cutting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Soup Kitchen Confidential
Shotgun cooks up redemption in soup kitchen drama Grand Concourse. My review is in the East Bay Times and Mercury News. Kevin Clarke in Shotgun Players’ Grand Concourse. Photo by Pak Han. Review:...
View Article
