For the first of many “don’t try this at home” sequences, in Aurélia’s Oratorio the lights come up on a timeworn, three-tiered chest of drawers. A hand and a foot pop out. Then red high …

At first it looks as if Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers (1991) will repeat the coming-of-age theme in his Brighton Beach trilogy. It’s 1942. When their father hits the road to pay off a loan …

The idea behind Duncan Sheik and Kyle Jarrow’s new musical has potential: What if only certain characters sing? And what if they’re ghosts haunting a lighthouse during World War II? The people in the “real …

David Rabe set Hurlyburly, a three-hour emotional maelstrom, in the Hollywood Hills, early ’80s. As I watched Ion Theatre’s snappy, polished, visceral production, I had a nagging sense of déjà vu. Then it dawned: I …

In the bottom circle of Dante’s Inferno, Satan is a gigantic, three-headed monster waist-deep in a lake of ice. His three mouths chew the world’s worst traitors: Brutus and Cassius, who killed Caesar, to the …

Greatest achievement of 2009: though double-teamed by a rotten economy and the swine flu scare, our theaters survived, though many by the slimmest of margins. Many of 2009’s finest productions were ensemble efforts: each actor …

In 1953, Tennessee Williams sent the equivalent of a neutron bomb to Broadway. He wrote Camino Real to demolish theatrical realism. Don Quixote, the archetypal antirealist, falls asleep and envisions a new kind of theater, …

I must admit a bias. Long before way back when, the Pacific Theatre in Santa Cruz audience-tested movies on Tuesday nights. A bunch of us went for free and filled out questionnaires after. We kissed …

And now for something (almost completely) different: for decades, the San Diego Rep staged A Christmas Carol during the holiday season. On the surface, this year’s yuletide production, The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson, couldn’t be …

Link and younger brother Booth have virtuoso hands. To hear him tell it, Link was “the Stink,” the “be all end all,” best three-card monte hustler in town. He could “throw” the cards — two …

If she’s right, Tiffany Stern has cracked a theatrical mystery: how companies rehearsed — or didn’t — between 1567 and 1780. Her book, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, first appeared in 2000. Reactions to it, …

Alexander Dodge’s glitzy set for the Old Globe’s Sammy includes stately, showcase-windowlike structures framed by rows of blinking lights. They feature props for the scene, or people who pose, in Fabio Toblini’s classy period costumes, …

Okay, Hope isn’t quite snockered to the gills. She’s sober enough to recognize a tight spot. In this case, literally: the cramped studio apartment of a man far too young for her tastes. Charles is …

Thus far, the La Jolla Playhouse’s season has been forgettable. In Terrence McNally’s slight Unusual Acts of Devotion and Claudia Shear’s not-ready-for-prime-time Restoration, the sets — for good or ill — were more memorable than …

Ken Carpenter doesn’t look like a dramatic lead. Soft-spoken, bespectacled, a slight humble stoop in the shoulders, the 57-year-old’s a successful insurance salesman in Lincoln, Nebraska. He’s been with one woman for the past 40 …

Tough acts to follow. Welk Resorts Theatre begins The Andrews Brothers with video clips from the old USO Command Performance radio shows. Bob Hope jokes with Lana Turner. Young-ish Judy Garland sings an “Over the …

One of the greatest casualties of the First World War was information. A devastating H1N1 influenza virus broke out early in 1918. Even though it originated, some now speculate, in Haskell County, Kansas, the virus …

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 …

She’d send, she proclaimed, “a message from above.” On Thursday, January 27, 1921, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson stood in the cockpit of a Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny.” Wearing a leather coat and cap, tinted goggles across …

Kid Smith was disgusted. For three rounds, the iron-jawed middleweight took the fight to Jimmy Meyers, but their bout ended in a draw. After a monster right almost cracked his ribs, Meyers steered clear, and …

‘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. …

A SPECULATION. John W. Collins had nothing left. One of San Diego’s most beloved citizens and president of California National Bank, Collins lost his wife and two children in a boating accident in 1890. Eighteen …

THE FALL. On September 1, 1890, while he was in San Francisco on business, John W. Collins’s wife Fannie, daughter Mary, son Johnny, and three others drowned in a boating accident off Point Loma. “Nothing …

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, …

THE RISE. In 1880, San Diego County had 4961 official residents. By early 1887, an estimated 30,000 newcomers had arrived, with thousands more on the way. Immigrants, health-seekers, and speculators came to buy property for …

THE RAID. On September 10, 1909, city prosecutor Edgar Luce, chief of police Keno Wilson, and a detective named Smith crossed the Market Street “dead line” and took a stroll through the Stingaree, San Diego’s …

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 …

THE MOST HATED MAN IN SAN DIEGO. From 1910 to 1912, Walter Bellon inspected San Diego’s waterfront, Chinatown, and the Stingaree district for the health department. If an owner failed to make basic improvements, the …

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 …

WALTER BELLON. In 1936, Max Miller’s I Cover the Waterfront became a national bestseller. Miller wrote about San Diego’s tough harbor district, its “land sharks” and “bruisers.” Fifty-five-year-old Walter Bellon read the book and roared: …

On February 15, 1898, the Monterey sailed into San Diego Bay. The ship had been at sea for more than a month. The next day around noon, half the crew got liberty and hurtled through …

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 Cribs. In 1887, a reporter for the San Diego Union grew a beard, wore threadbare duds, and stealth’d through San Diego’s red-light district. He was shocked to see drunks on every corner. Some clung …

Let’s take a walk through time. We’re at the southwest corner of Fifth and K, part of the Gaslamp Quarter. At night, lines form under bright lights at popular clubs and restaurants. Between 1875 and …

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 …

"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 …