San Diego Theater Reviews
The late Herb Gardner (he died in 2003) hand-wrote his plays on a Central Park bench. One day, the author of A Thousand Clowns watched two old men nearby, one black, one white. They would …
‘He’s WHAT?” Word of mouth roared through the North Coast Repertory Theatre: “Burt Bacharach’s coming Friday night!” At first, Steve Gunderson went into deep Waiting for Guffman denial. Then the lifelong devotee of Bacharach’s music …
In the 1950s, led by John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, British playwrights railed against the establishment’s bankrupt values and hypocrisy. In the 1990s, Sarah Kane, Mark Ravenhill, and others became part of the “In …
The telephone rings. Then it rings. Then, like an irate brat, the phone REALLY RINGS. And you wonder: where have I heard that progression — an everyday object grown monstrous — before? Soon it dawns. …
The press packet for Herringbone at the La Jolla Playhouse includes an “artist’s statement” claiming that the “dark, quirky musical allegory” hopes “to illuminate the schizophrenia of what it means to be an American.” Well, …
And you thought you knew Oz. I suspect the one thing all Americans have in common, culturally, isn’t the Super Bowl or the Academy Awards. It’s The Wizard of Oz. How many times have you …
One of the enduring questions about William Shakespeare, which might have surprised him: where did he stand? In Coriolanus, for example, did he side with the Roman poor, who threaten to rebel over shortages of …
The boondoggle makes logical sense, at first. A storm capsized Viola and twin brother Sebastian’s ship off Illyria. When the ship split in two, Viola went with one half; Sebastian, lashed to the mast and …
The La Jolla Playhouse’s popular Page to Stage series, which presents readings of works in progress, has an astonishing track record: Billy Crystal’s 700 Sundays was a major Broadway hit; Doug Wright’s I Am My …
The North Coast Rep took a huge risk, on paper at least. Tom Dudzick’s Over the Tavern has roles for four children, ranging from 8 to 16. The safe choice: find teenage-ish actors (i.e., twentysomething), …
The first time I saw The Fantasticks, way back when, I took my fiancée. We adored the chipper first act, in which a “tender and callow” boy and girl fall in a love beyond metaphor. …
How did Shakespeare do it? How did the author of King Lear, Henry IV, Part One, and The Winter’s Tale compose two plays a year for almost two decades? A comparative look at the writing …
On May 15, 1972, Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace had toned down his vein-bulging, racist views and began to rise in the opinion polls. He gave a speech at a shopping center in Laurel, Maryland. …
‘We invent ourselves,” Walter Franz tells his brother Vic, “to wipe out what we know.” The title of Arthur Miller’s 1968 drama, The Price, points in various directions, none of them fixed. Ostensibly, it’s about …
A fitting session with costume designer Jennifer Brawn Gittings begins to look a lot like Christmas. She hauls racks of clothes and boxes of shoes to Diversionary Theatre’s small dressing room, where the four actors …
In the sleek, two-story lobby of the Potiker Theater, a soldier saluted, quarter-turned to the east, shoveled imaginary dirt, quarter-turned to the south, peeled imaginary potatoes, turned west, lifted imaginary weights, turned back to where …