San Diego Theater Reviews
"In Spain there was Guernica! But here there was only hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with …
Marc Blitzstein’s play The Cradle Will Rock had one of the most famous premieres in theater history. The Federal Theatre Project commissioned, then dumped, the piece, which the powers that be deemed too far left …
Call your play Rabbit Hole, and you conjure images of a tardy white hare shouting “I’m late!” with a ticking clock tucked under one arm. Given David Lindsay-Abaire’s other works — Kimberly Akimbo, about a …
Sound designers usually draw raves for obvious effects: street traffic, flocks of chirping birds, hammer-the-walls thunder. Their background scores also set mood and period. But the sound designer’s primary job is far more crucial: how …
The times they have a-change-ed. Working, Studs Terkel’s remarkable collection of interviews, was published in 1974. Subtitled “People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,” the book’s …
The Brecht police will probably snipe at the San Diego Rep’s Threepenny Opera: how it fails to achieve this or that aspect of his “Epic Theater.” And the production is open to potshots. But the …
Henry Louis Grin (1847–1921) was a jack of many trades: a footman for the famous actress Fanny Kemble, a Swiss banker’s servant, an inventor, and a photographer who took pictures of ectoplasmic auras for psychics. …
Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death has such a contemporary feel, it’s almost impossible to believe he wrote the play — hailed by many as “the best first play in world literature” — in 1835, at age …
WILL NO ONE MOURN THE CARTER? The Cassius Carter Centre Stage is no more. The Old Globe demolished its intimate theater-in-the-round to make way for a state-of-the-art, ADA-compliant arena. Named for its generous donors, the …
Diane lost her husband, a “brilliant” CEO, in Africa. Now the socialite wants to sell the house, land a job (her first), and sever all connections with her past. Diane’s in such deep denial, her …
In the theater, said Marlon Brando, “You can have a universal experience of fear, of anger, of tears, of love, and I discovered that it’s the audience, really, that’s doing the acting.” Audiences can also …
Flan and Ouisa Kittridge verge on having it all: two children at Harvard, one at Groton; a grand Fifth Avenue apartment near Jackie O’s; a couple of Mark Rothkos and a two-sided Kandinsky on the …
When American Buffalo premiered on Broadway in 1977, critics had to devise new terms to praise David Mamet’s craft. It wasn’t simply realistic, they said; it was “micro-real” or “hyper-real” or even “really real.” Mamet’s …
This column’s late. I got bit but good by that bug going around. “Re-view” a year — would that were possible, literally re-see favorite shows and performances of 2008. But they’re gone. Live theater is …
Each holiday season, Lamb’s Players presents an annual Christmas show at its resident theater and a three-hour extravaganza, An American Christmas, at the Hotel del Coronado. Set 100 years ago, the program for American Christmas …
Hooo-boy… Christmas is just around the corner, yet the residents of Tuna, the third-smallest town in Texas — even counting “greater” Tuna — are so low on holiday cheer it won’t wet the dipstick. The …