San Diego Theater Reviews
‘What is our town coming to?” asks Mama Cecelyn. “We got whores, pimps, drug addicts, murderers, and liars in Storyville. But now we even have horn thieves amongst us. Mmm. Mmm. Mmm.” She just put …
’It were sport, Uncle,” Abigail Williams tells the Reverend Parris three pages into The Crucible. Arthur Miller took the quotation from the testimony of Mary Warren, a servant of John Proctor. Accused of witchcraft in …
"Each of us who loves the theater,” writes John Lithgow, “has a secret list of the great shows we never got to see.” His may be. Mine’s not. I would love to have seen the …
Amid Athol Fugard’s Nobel Prize–worthy opus are plays about individuals on the margin of the Big Picture. In Blood Knot, Master Harold and the Boys, Sizwe Banzai Is Dead, and others, Fugard shows the cruel …
In Walden, Henry David Thoreau says doing good can have selfish motives. Goodness, he writes, “must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he …
In one of his gleefully apocalyptic pronouncements, William S. Burroughs said we should regard consciousness as a “failed experiment.” The Man in Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground (1864), which Burroughs committed to memory, says consciousness is …
An alert to my colleagues in the San Diego Theatre Critics Circle: I hereby nominate Rob McClure for a Craig Noel Award, Lead Performance in a Musical, Male. His Charlie Chaplin in Limelight, at the …
The program for Moonlight’s Miss Saigon shows the famous photo that inspired the musical. Taken in 1975 at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Vietnam, it’s a frantic crowd scene. In the foreground, a …
If you don’t blink, Stephen Dietz’s Becky’s New Car makes for an entertaining evening. Blink, however, or pause for reflection, and how and why things happen would perplex even the most gullible among us. Maybe …
Back when, a dear friend used to give mix tapes as gifts: collections of favorite songs on audio cassettes. She insisted that the sequence was as important as the songs. Like a baseball lineup, it …
Calling your trilogy of plays The Norman Conquests makes it sound like a medieval tryptich or Bayeux Tapestry illustrating the events of 1066: William the Conqueror storming across Hastings, lance lowered, the banner of destiny …
San Diegans hear a show’s “Broadway bound” so much the tag has lost pizzazz. The Old Globe’s recent musicals — The First Wives’ Club, Sammy, and The Whisper House — came decked with Great White …
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 148 complains: “O me, what eyes hath love put in my head,/ Which have no correspondence with true sight!/ Or if they have, where is my judgment fled,/ That censures falsely what they …
At the theater critics’ annual Craig Noel Awards ceremony, recipients thank fellow artists and friends for support. But just what does that support entail? What, for example, is it like to be married to an …
The Old Globe is staging two plays about monarchs gone mad: Shakespeare’s King Lear and Alan Bennett’s Madness of George III. Lear’s is self-inflicted. A seemingly simple test of love has a “butterfly effect.” Families …
The males in Shakespeare’s original audience for Taming of the Shrew probably saw Petruchio as a Hercules and Katherine Minola as his 13th labor, far graver than swabbing down the Augean stables or slaying the …