Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Back to profile

Stories by Jeff Smith

A Spin on Fortune's Wheel: The Life of a Mine

When he was ten miles from Placerville, in 1851, gold fever struck J.D. Borthwick hard. Five men slung heavy pickaxes by the roadside. They looked like “so many grave diggers,” but much more determined. Borthwick, …

Unforgettable San Diego: Did They Go Gentle Into That New Town? Part Two

Albert Seeley ran the U.S. Mail stage line from San Diego to Yuma and Los Angeles. In 1868, Seeley bought the Bandini residence in Old Town. When Alonzo Horton heard Seeley wanted to convert it …

Cygnet Theatre's Tragedy of the Commons and a Musical Emma at the Globe

Dakin and Macy Adams live on the southern slope of Mount Soledad, about a mile up from Bird Rock. Their terrace overlooks P.B., Mission Bay, and Point Loma. Pan left and there’s SeaWorld and, deeper …

February 9, 2011
Do Not Go Gentle Into That New Town, Part One

San Diego may be unique in American history as the only city that changed locations. In 1871, the county seat moved three-and-a-half miles south, from Old to New Town. The change, literally, tore the city …

Death of a Salesman at the Old Globe

God created time, an old adage holds, to keep everything from happening at once. If so, then Willy Loman is running out of time. Events from now and yesterday inundate him, often with competing claims. …

February 2, 2011
Nicky Silver's Dark Farce

Andrew, a gay character in Nicky Silver’s Maiden’s Prayer, says he looks for three things in a man: the size of his Manhattan apartment, if he has cable, and external beauty. Then he pauses, sensing …

January 12, 2011
Where Words Fail

In one sense the best, in most others the worst of times. Throughout the county the level of performance has never been higher. You can expect competent acting in most local theaters. Two examples: Scripps …

December 29, 2010
Good at Being Bad

Satan and Moloch just got laid off. Times are so economically splattered, even Lucifer’s minions are getting pink-slipped. Okay, sure, devil-work — tempting sinners and terrorizing saints — wears a mite thin after a millennium …

December 15, 2010
Ruined at the La Jolla Playhouse

If plays are boxing matches with an audience, they all throw punches, some solid, some glancing, some airy nothing. Plays that linger counterpunch. These land on your way out the door, in the parking lot, …

December 1, 2010
Red Lights, Slow Time: Storyville at the Lyceum

‘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 …

November 23, 2010
The Crucible at Moxie Theatre

’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 …

November 17, 2010
The American Stage

"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 …

November 10, 2010
Eerie Twists in Gee's Bend

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 …

October 27, 2010
The Glory Man at Lamb's Players Theatre

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 …

October 20, 2010
The Man at La Jolla Playhouse

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 …

October 6, 2010
Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin

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 …

September 29, 2010
Miss Saigon at the Moonlight and Jack Goes Boating at the Ion

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 …

September 22, 2010
Life's Like a Dream in North Coast Rep's Becky's New Car

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 …

September 15, 2010
miXtape Cues '80s Music and Memories at the Horton Grand Theatre

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 …

Control Freak

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 …

August 25, 2010
Tommy Guns and Classy Tunes

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 …

August 11, 2010
Love’s Errant Eyes

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 …

August 4, 2010
Death Alley

The Butterfield Stage line between Warner’s Ranch and Oak Grove was a narrow trail, dusty in summer, soggy in winter, rutted the year round. On its weekly treks, the stage always stopped at Deadman’s Hole, …

I Just Saw a Frightful Monster

When he recalled his early years in San Diego, Herbert Hensley loved to tell about the time Jimmie Dillar saw the devil. In June 1890, as he explored the treeless mesa where Balboa Park stands …

Another Love

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 …

July 28, 2010
There Go the Lovers

In the great romantic legend of early San Diego, Josefa Carrillo falls in love with Henry Delano Fitch, a Massachusetts seaman. But Governor José Maria Echeandia forbids their marriage. So late one night, the star-crossed …

Royal Madness

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 …

Here Come the Trappers

“What nameless tortures and miseries Americans suffer in foreign climes from despots,” complained the mountain man James Ohio Pattie. “They hate the victims of their oppression, as judging their hearts by their own.” One of …

Icon or Abusive Swine?

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 …

He Lived in Interesting Times

“You are a devil!” the Mexican governor of California shouted at his American prisoner, a shaggy-haired fur trapper named James Ohio Pattie. Then, with the eye of “an enraged beast” and the “growl of a …

Words Like Arrows

Adrian Noble has written a valuable book: How to Do Shakespeare. In it, the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company teaches a master class on the subject. He sums up the objective behind …

Mutual Obligations

Rachel Hauck’s set for Surf Report, at the La Jolla Playhouse, tells much of the story by itself. A sleek unit structure, upper walkway and open lower area, serves as a house, an office, even …

June 30, 2010
The Giant Eye Rolls Uphill

“The disk is a whale,” Howard Blakeslee, science editor at Associated Press, wrote to George Ellery Hale in 1934. “Every detail is on a scale so much larger than anything heretofore attempted.” “And if the …

Back to the '30s

Noel Coward’s elegant, daffy Private Lives begins where most comedies end. Two pairs of honeymooners take in the scenery at Deauville, France’s classiest seaside resort. While an orchestra plays below, they prepare for a fashionably …

June 16, 2010
Odyssey of the Giant Eye

Jack Belyea’s truck company became world famous for hauling gargantuan objects. In 1930, he and his brothers transported a 110-foot, 115-ton kiln 26 miles, then lowered it down a 20-percent grade with winches. They moved …

From Outside-In

Say you’re Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie, which almost didn’t make it to New York, was an empyrean success in 1945. It ran for 561 performances and vaulted Williams to the heights. It also raised …

June 9, 2010
Palomar Pioneers: Of Travail and Tragedy

Rattler ManJoseph Beresford, son of a British Lord, fell in love with the ­gardener’s daughter. His father, whose lineage went back to James I, gave him an ultimatum: marry beneath your rank and lose your …

Palomar Pioneers: The Water Bearer

In 1904, young Elise Roberts and her family summered on Palomar Mountain. They left their Long Beach home in a roofed wagon, half packed with clothes and bedding, the other half filled with hay for …

Doctor in the House?

Playwright Matthew Lopez discovered a surprising parallel in U.S. history. On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee signed the documents of surrender at the Appomattox Court House; on the 12th, the Army of Northern …

May 26, 2010
Advance, Retreat

The Meters, a New Orleans funk band, asked in song, “Now that we found love, what’re we gonna do with it?” Terence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune offers contrasting ­answers. Maybe …

May 19, 2010
She's the Best Man

Sometimes when she talks, a cigarette dangles from the right side of her mouth, the tip bobbing up and down — à la George C. Scott — with each word. At other times she leans …

May 12, 2010
Craig Stories, Act 2

Craig Noel died in his home on April third. He was 94. Friends remember the Father of San Diego Theater. THE PERSONJack O’Brien, artistic director emeritus, Old Globe Theatre. In the mid- to late ’60s, …

May 5, 2010
Craig Stories, Act 1

Craig Noel died in his home on April third. He was 94. Friends remember the Father of San Diego Theater. THE PERSONConrad Susa, composer. Craig was my deep soul brother. I first met him at …

April 28, 2010
Fear the Light

The “ghosts” in Henrik Ibsen’s drama don’t go bump in the night. But they’re just as haunting. Only Mrs. Alving sees them. For 19 years she fought to keep her public image from collapsing. Pressures …

April 21, 2010
No Dragons

Cygnet Theatre is fast becoming Sondheim Central. Their Little Night Music captivated audiences, they are stage reading/singing Passion on April 12 and 13, and their current Sweeney Todd threatens to blow out the doors at …

April 7, 2010
But I Am No One

How do you prove you aren’t an “interesting human being”? Since he broke up with his girlfriend, Khaled’s lived in a dinky, book-clogged studio where he starts but can’t finish short stories. He’s got writer’s …

March 31, 2010
Boing Boing Clunk

Boeing-Boeing at the Old Globe: the title sounds like someone bouncing on a trampoline, which actually describes the French farce, if the bouncers are Boeing jets taking off and landing at Orly Airport and deplaning …

March 24, 2010
Fairy Tale, with Knives

If you get the chance, do see Moonlight Stage Productions’ wonderful Ring Round the Moon. It’s got a terrific cast, a handsome look, humor, brainteasers, and panache — and closes March 21. Asked what he …

March 10, 2010
Us and Them

If there were no world outside their stately home, the Birlings would have it made. Arthur, the patriarch and former Lord Mayor of Brumley, England, might be up for knighthood. His daughter, Sheila, is engaged …

February 24, 2010
The Right Life

A patient of Dr. Oliver Sacks suffered a massive stroke. “Mrs. S” retained her intelligence and humor but could no longer see anything left of her nose. “She has totally lost the idea of left,” …

February 17, 2010

Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

This Week’s Reader This Week’s Reader