JANUARY 2011:

MEASURE FOR MEASURE: This was a staged reading by Subterranean Shakespeare in some kind of meeting room in a Unitarian Church in Berkeley. They did a whole series of these on consecutive Monday nights, putting a lot of work into plays that were only seen one time each.  Of the ones I went to see Measure for Measure comes to mind right now because it’s one of my favorites and doesn’t get produced very often. SubShakes proved that Measure for Measure is not a “problem play.”

April 2011:

SPEED-THE-PLAY: Move About Theatre simultaneously did four short plays outdoors on the four sides of Union Square in downtown SF. I was really impressed with the one called Speed-the-Play, which had  everything David Mamet ever wrote squeezed into seven minutes. There were tourists walking by who were probably wondering why these people were talking so fast and yelling and swearing at each other so much.

http://moveabouttheatre.com/Upcoming.html

May 2011:

THREE SISTERS :

“VERSHININ. I have come to say good-bye. . . .

[OLGA moves a little away to leave them free to say good-bye.]

MASHA [looking into his face]. Good-bye . . . [a prolonged kiss].

OLGA. Don’t, don’t. . . .

[MASHA sobs violently.]“

Berkeley Rep’s production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, directed by Les Waters, had everything it needed: an awesome cast, beautiful period costumes and sets, and Russian vodka served in the lobby during intermission.

http://www.berkeleyrep.org/

July 2011:

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM: I took a theatre trip to New York City and saw five plays in three days. I planned the weekend vacation around seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company, who were visiting from the UK. But the plays that made it to this list aren’t the RSC productions that I had bought tickets for months in advance. They’re two local shows I didn’t know I was going to see till I got there:

The first was A Midsummer Night’s Dream,  in a storefront theatre on 23rd Street that, I’m guessing, might have originally been someone’s townhouse. The opening scene was staged as a cocktail party, not unlike festivities that might have actually taken place in the same room once upon a time, with an open bar and guests toasting from a loft balcony. And then, we all went off into the forest…

Afterwards, at the end of a day that had started in San Francisco, I wasn’t even sure where I was. But I was glad to be there.

http://thehivetheatre.com/

July 2011:

On the asphalt at Shakespeare in the Parking Lot

HAMLET : My second night in NYC I saw Hamlet performed in a parking lot at the corner of Ludlow and Broome. I have a tendency to romanticize experiences like this. I’ve been trying to write about it for six months, using a lot of my favorite words – urban, cool, visceral, modern, primal, downtown, lucid, punk, Ophelia, etc. – all of which would have been appropriate. But there was much than that going on. This was a really fantastic Hamlet, and it would have been just as fantastic anywhere else The Drilling Company might have set up shop. The Bard was right: all the world is a stage.

Gertrude and Hamlet. (With the corpse of Pollonius leaning against the street light. )

http://shakespeareintheparkinglot.com/

September 2011:

CYMBELINE : Life in San Francisco wasn’t the same after I got back from New York, and I was grateful when the SF Shakespeare Festival began their annual residency in the Presidio. I’ve written about them before – seeing them on a cold, foggy Saturday night (or a hot sunny Sunday afternoon) is always a pleasure, and I still don’t understand why more people don’t check them out. Hey, it’s free! The SF Chronicle didn’t even review this year’s show, Cymbeline, and it was one of the best things they’ve ever done. It’s not one of the classics, but in their capable hands it was not only entertaining but moving.

http://sfshakes.org/park/index.html

October 2011:

INANNA’S DESCENT : Last year Ragged Wing took over a trippy neighborhood park in Berkeley and turned it into a mythic, interactive underworld for Persephone’s Roots. This year they were back with a different Goddess, but with the common theme of death and rebirth. It was that time of year – the final performance was on Halloween. Heavy stuff,  but with a sense of humor and original music. This was something that could be experienced over and over and be different every time.

http://www.raggedwing.org/show/show_detail/18

Here’s an interview I did with the director, Anna Shneiderman, in 2010:

http://voxtheatricum.wordpress.com/2010/10/21/persephones-roots-an-all-hallows-eve-ritual/

October 2011: DESDEMONA & GOOD NIGHT DESDEMONA (GOOD MORNING, JULIET): I wrote a previous blog post about these two plays, both done at the Boxcar Theatre. I’m looking forward to returning to the Boxcar this year, when they’ll be doing four Sam Shepard plays in repertory.

http://voxtheatricum.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/desdemona-the-lady-is-a-tramp/

November 2011:

HAIR: I really loved Hair, The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, which was in town for four weeks at the Golden Gate Theater. I’m still in a blissful state, and not yet ready to analyze what happened. Check back with me later for more details.

http://www.facebook.com/hairbroadway?ref=ts

December 2011:

BAD HAMLET – The Bootleg Quarto of 1603: I found this one by pure serendipity. I was walking home from the library and saw a poster for it in a window. At first I thought it was some kind of prank, but I went back in the evening to check it out and it was, indeed, real. Was it “bad?” No, actually, it was great. In closing I’d like to thank Do It Live! Productions: having a chance to see Hamlet again this year was, for me, a happy ending to 2011.

http://badhamletsf.blogspot.com/

Pax-

Vox

(Asphalt photo by Andrea Beeman/Bioluminosity B&B. Gertrude and Hamlet photo by Lee Wexler/Images for Innovation.)

I just went to a theatre in downtown San Francisco called the boxcar. It’s in a dark alley of one of the last gritty blocks left in downtown San Francisco. This micro-neighborhood seems to have missed all the gentrification that’s happened since I moved here twenty years ago. I don’t know if that’s why I didn’t visit the Boxcar till this month. But they finally got my attention by doing not one but two modern plays featuring characters created by Shakespeare. The first one, which was only done on four nights, was called “Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet.)” I’d never seen anything quite like it. The main character gets to step into two Shakespeare plays, prevent tragedies, and then find out what happens instead.

I quickly became caught up in what was going on. It actually wasn’t about Desdemona and Juliet so much as it was about the modern woman stuck in grad school somewhere who went back and met them. She was, it seemed, learning about herself; not changing Shakespeare’s stories, but her own. And that was a really interesting idea. And a great production!  This was a fully staged performance that was put together just to be done when the main show was dark, which meant I saw it on a Monday night. When it was over I was amazed at what I had seen, the hard work that had gone into it, and how I lucky I was to have gotten the chance to experience it.

Tonight I saw the main show, still running in the same space, which was just called “Desdemona.” There was what might have been a subtitle that asked the question, “What if Desdemona really was a whore?” I’m not sure if that is an actual part of the name of the play.  I’ll do the research later. This is my gut reaction to what I saw, and I dug it. “Desdemona” was kind of like Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” in that it is a look at some scenes that were missing from another play. The play in this case would be “Othello,” though the Moor himself did not appear. (For a moment he could be heard slapping his wife offstage.)

There was just Emelia, Desdemona and Bianca and a story about what they might have been really like.  How did they end up in the situation that they were in? Why did they behave the way they did? In this play their fates didn’t change, but who they might have been did. “Othello” is not one of my favorite plays but now I’m looking forward to seeing it again from the perspective of these three women.

I was once again impressed by the efforts of a great cast and everyone else involved in putting on the show. I’m not sure what all this means.  The boxcar theatre itself is small, but the talent in it is gigantic. And the alley the theatre is on isn’t really that dark. It’s got streetlights and there’s a lot of traffic going by and it’s easy to get to.  I’ll be going back there again. There’s a lot there to be discovered – and that, perhaps, is what both of these plays were about.

http://boxcartheatre.org/

Pax,

Vox

PS – “Goodnight Desdemona…” was the second play I’ve seen recently that featured ukulele playing, and it sounded wonderful. If this is the beginning of a trend, that’s fine with me.

Town Hall Theatre puts on a quality show, and I won’t be waiting till their next revival of “Twelfth Night” to return. I also enjoyed the road trip to Lafayette. It’s quiet and peaceful out there, and when the play was over and I walked outside the night sky was gorgeous!
pax,

Vox

http://www.townhalltheatre.com/

Ariane Daniele Forster, better known as Ari Up, died month. It was reported that the cause of death was a “serious illness” but there were no other details available. I was kind of shocked to find out. Less that a year ago she played at The Bottom of The Hill in San Francisco with The Slits and she had looked great, with waist-length dreadlocks that she kept in motion as she jumped around the stage. Ari promised the audience that she’d be back to town soon to promote a new Slits album, which made this unexpected news even sadder.

The Slits were one of the original London punk bands and played many of the same venues as the Clash and The Sex Pistols. (Johnny Rotten eventually ended up marrying Ari’s mother!) But they were the last band from that scene to be signed to a recording contract, and their first album, “Cut”, wasn’t released until 1979. “I Heard it Through the Grapevine,” a non-LP single issued at the same time, was popular in the clubs for a while, they released one more album and quietly faded away.

Then, in 2005 Ari and original bassist Tessa Pollitt reformed The Slits. In the following years they played in San Francisco three times. I was lucky enough to see all three shows. Actually I was lucky to even hear about them – like many of the things that the Slits did during their original incarnation these shows were not very well publicized or understood. They played in three different clubs, each one smaller than the previous, and the audiences also kept decreasing in size. At their last SF gig I think most of the people watching their set were from the local opening acts.

But this didn’t stop Ari, Tessa, and their newly recruited band mates from putting on a memorable performance. Much has been written since they recorded “Cut” about how important The Slits were as a trailblazing female-fronted punk band, and that is very true. But I don’t think they’ve gotten enough credit for just how good their songs were. Their lyrics and melodies from the 70s, which had been written while the Slits were all teenagers, still sound fresh and original. And let it remembered that, in her mid-40s, Ari could still sing them with love, and with a big smile on her face.

Pax,

Vox

I contacted Ragged Wing to get more info and ended up talking to the director, Anna Schneiderman.  So here, then, is my first blog interview, an edited transcription of what we talked about on the phone:  

ANNA SHNEIDERMAN: I co-founded Ragged Wing Ensemble in 2004. My background includes doing a lot of work in outdoor pageantry, ritual performance and large spectacle events with Bread and Puppet in Vermont and Redmoon in Chicago. I studied classical literature and philosophy at the University of Chicago – the Greeks mostly. I studied the connection between performance and ritual, and how ritual can be a performance. I strongly believe that theatre is ritual, and that it comes from that, and that there is a reason why it has survived so long.

The type of theatre that we usually see, where we go and sit in a theater and watch something from beginning to end, and there is this separation between the audience and the performers, doesn’t really serve that ritual function anymore – although I feel it has the potential to. On the other side, many rituals today don’t have any craft to them. What I feel is important, and what we’re trying to recreate, is something that is in between: that is crafted and rehearsed and at the same time it involves the audience in a ritual that they can participate in, that feels like they’re making something happen.

I’ve wanted to do something for Halloween for a really long time. I love Halloween, and the sense of accessing the spirit world is compelling to me. It’s my favorite holiday, and I didn’t want to just go to a party. I wanted to celebrate it in a more sacred and intentional way.

So I looked around at what was happening in the Bay Area; I thought it would be great to create something for Halloween that was a ritual and a performance, and some way for community to come together. Then, maybe six or seven months ago it clicked that this Persephone myth would be a great way to work on it. Basically it’s a journey into the underworld, and there is moment where she has this choice, and there is a deal that happens at the end where she goes back and forth between the underworld and the upperworld. The cycle of the year gets created at that moment. It’s a powerful story, and really relevant to the moment of Halloween.

The next step was I found this park in Berkeley – Codornices Park. It has this tunnel that I fell in love with, and it has this field and this wooded area with all these nooks and crannies. It’s really mysterious and beautiful. So these three thoughts came together: the Halloween ritual, the Persephone myth, and this park. And it all made sense to do the show at this place and this time.

I’m not in the Pagan community; I didn’t realize that the gods in this story were living deities; Little did I know that people are actually honoring them in a living religion. I think it’s great. I’m totally thrilled that Persephone and Demeter are still living Gods. I had no idea. This story and its archetypes are in the culture. And people, even if they aren’t Pagan, usually have some awareness of the archetypes. These are archetypes that everyone can connect with, and I hope that the way we handle this myth can be acceptable also to people for whom these are living gods and goddesses.

I don’t myself pray to these deities. But I feel that by making this performance it’s kind of like I’m praying to them; because it’s a piece of art that we’re creating about them, which is probably the hugest honor you can do. I want it to be open to anybody, not just people who believe in these deities as their own deities. There is a reason for ritual; It’s kind of essential to human nature. But a lot of people in our culture have lost the opportunity to participate in ritual on a regular basis. So I feel that the function of this performance is to be a ritual without being religious, so that people from any background can access that thing that we need.

I have nine people in the creation ensemble. They’re actors, singers and dancers, and we’re creating it together through a collaborative process. They’re coming at it as actors, not Pagans. They auditioned to be in a show. It’s more about creating an experience for the audience than about fully embodying the gods oneself. I think there is something about collectively putting on this performance that is really magical, and then we offer that to the audience so that they can experience it too.

The audience is going to enter the park and we’ll give them certain objects to hold and things to do so that they can interact with the piece as they go through. There will be live music, and the audience will help make it. There will bells to ring, and rhythms to clap, and there will be call and response songs. We’re kind of thinking of the audience as a Greek chorus. But it’s not going to be like a Greek tragedy where we all sit in a big amphitheater and watch it.

They’ll meet the two main characters, Persephone and Demeter. Persephone will discover the underworld. I’m going with the idea that she chooses to go into the underworld; it’s not an abduction. She feels the pull of the underworld. Another thing we’re doing with this piece is that Hades is not represented as a character, but more as like a force, and a place that Persephone wants to go; she is attracted by this dark force and then invites the audience to join her. So we will go with her and go into this tunnel and follow her path.

In my research I found that the myth of Persephone is a marker for the patriarchal religion taking over from the Goddess religion. Basically Demeter, Persephone and Hecate all pre-dated Zeus and the other Olympian gods. The idea of Hades abducting Persephone, and this forced marriage, is part of a series of myths about forced marriages that basically are about sublimating the goddess religions to the patriarchal religions that came in with the Hellenistic gods. One of the reasons I have gotten so excited about doing this particular story was the idea of bringing our society back into balance, and bringing back the presence of the goddess to our culture.

People who come to this might not normally go to something that was fully a ritual, and then maybe they’ll get taken into the ritual side of it as well. The parts where the audience can interact are essential to the piece. But it won’t be intimidating or scary or putting people on the spot. They’ll feel like they’re a part of it and they’re making things happen, but nobody is expecting them to stand up and say something, or to go into a trance. Anybody, including kids, will be able to come and experience this.

“Persephone’s Roots” runs Wed, Oct. 27 – Sun, Oct. 31 @ 5:30 pm at Codornices Park, 1201 Euclid Ave. in Berkeley, CA. This is a free event. More info at www.raggedwing.org

Pax, and Happy Halloween!

-Vox

I discovered a large crowd of people watching an outdoor movie. I was surprised and delighted! The movie was “Dirty Dancing,” and it was being shown on a big screen like the ones they used to have at drive-in movies. But instead of cars lined up in rows there were people all over the Square sitting on blankets and folding chairs and digging the show. I walked around the edges of the audience and found a place to join them. 

I’d never seen “Dirty Dancing” before but I quickly figured out what was going on. I cheered and applauded along with everyone else as the story neared it’s conclusion. The music had stopped and there was a lot of drama and talking, and then what was clearly the big moment arrived: Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey began dancing together to the hit song “The Time of My Life.” It was awesome, but I was not prepared for what happened next. People in the audience started standing up and dancing too! There was a big empty space on the ground in front of the movie screen, and suddenly it was filled up with dancers. And I mean lots of dancers. There I was, in the heart of the Theatre District on a Saturday night, and it was alive with music and dance. It was so cool that even now, two weeks later, I find it hard to believe it actually happened. 

The dancing continued all the way through the last credits. When it ended I wandered through the crowd, enjoying the glow of so many smiling faces. Eventually I made it to my apartment, which is two blocks from there, and checked my email. There was something from The Move-About Theatre Company informing me that they had just started a 24-hour project: they would create three short plays from scratch and have them ready to perform the next evening – in Union Square!

So I went to see them, and they did what they said they were going to do. The plays were all funny and mysterious genre pieces. Considering the self imposed time (and other) limitations I thought they were quite good – cleverly scripted, directed and costumed. My favorite was the second one, which reminded me of some the more existential “Twilight Zone” episodes. I don’t know who wrote what, but they all did a great job of putting on a show.

After seeing two wonderful events in 24 hours in the heart of the Theatre District I felt like Ronald Coleman in “Lost Horizon;”  I had once again been reminded that there are always amazing, and often unexpected, experiences out there waiting to be discovered.

pax,

Vox

Relevant links:

http://moveabouttheatre.com/

Here is a video that someone posted of the Saturday night movie screening. The camera is facing west – that’s the St. Francis Hotel behind the movie screen. When the camera pans to the right it catches a bit of my dangling backpack strap at 1:38 (I was standing to the right of the empty chair.) You can’t see anyone dancing, but you can hear the crowd cheering:

http://yfrog.com/hqgbgz

I’d also like to mention that the late, great actor Jerry Orbach is in this video, too (in “Dirty Dancing” of course.) He was one of the stars of the first New York production of “The Fantasticks-” that’s him singing “Try to Remember” on the original cast album, a recording I’ve been listening to and loving since I was around ten years old. And just a block away from Union Square, at the SF Playhouse, is a production of  ”The Fantasticks” that is being staged in honor of it’s 50th anniversary!

The film screening was co-presented by the The Jewish Film Festival and Film Night in the Park:

http://www.sfjff.org/

http://www.filmnight.org/index.html   

Shalom!

The Chicago production was a really powerful experience. I’m looking forward to going to New York (or London!) to see the Broadway revival. Till then,  I’m happy to report that it has also been revived locally – or at least close enough to home that I was able to get there on public transportation from San Francisco. Last week I went to Santa Cruz and saw “Hair” onstage on the campus of UCSC. I go to Santa Cruz every summer for the Shakespeare Festival and I was glad to be able to make the trip there for a different event. I love the town, and the campus, where the Festival is also held, is beautiful. It’s on a mountain in the middle of  a redwood forest. (And “Hair” also features two songs with lyrics taken from Shakespeare’s plays, so there was even a bit of a connection to the Festival.)

UC Santa Cruz used to have a reputation as an experimental “hippie” college; I don’t know how true that is any more, but the hippie spirit certainly came to life on stage. This was an especially joyous production – everyone in the large student cast seemed to be having a  great time. In the many productions of “Hair” that I have seen since experiencing the Chicago tribe there has often been an emphasis on the “bummers,” so to speak, that were around in the sixties; and there is a lot of that in the songs and story: the Vietnam war, the draft, the generation gap, racism, sexism, and so on. But “Hair,” in all of it’s counter-culture glory, is also a celebration of life. However misguided the characters might be, they’re trying to finding love, freedom, and happiness and having a lot of fun at times in the process. The UCSC staging, directed by Danny Scheie, plugged right into that, and it was a lot of fun to watch. 

And the students sounded great. I’ve often felt that “Hair” has a deep streak of gospel music running through its score, and this production confirmed my feelings. “Hair” is thought of as being a “rock musical,” but there actually isn’t much music in it that sounds like what rock bands were playing in the sixties. The cast of over 50 talented young people at UCSC was like an amazing choir in a really cool church. There was lots of call and response, beautiful choruses, powerful soloists and heartfelt spirituality. Hallelujah!

arts.ucsc.edu/news_events/hair
pax, 

Vox

I saw Public Image Limited (Pil) play in San Francisco on Saturday, April 17^th, at the Regency Center on Van Ness. I almost didn’t go; advance tickets were fifty bucks and there were an additional 12 or 13 dollars in service charges. But at the last minute I decided to buy a ticket at the door. The show was billed as “An Evening With Public Image Limited,” which meant that there was no opening act, PiL started on time and they played for a full two hours. It ended up being a fantastic experience that exceeded any expectations I had for it.

John Lydon, singer and founder of Pil, looked and sounded great. There are all sorts of clips of this reunion tour on Youtube, including the SF show, but there is nothing like being there in person. Public Image was LOUD, clean and tight. This is Pil’s first tour in 17 years. They played extended, and often danceable, versions of songs from all phases of their career. As I watched Lydon I thought about how he used to look when he was younger, with his spiky hair and sneer; He was sarcastic, insulting to audiences and always seemed angry about what was going on. His hair is now even spikier. But he has a friendly, if impish, grin and seemed happy to be on stage singing again, working with talented musicians and in a town that loves him. 

Lydon, of course, has a long history with San Francisco. On January 14, 1978, as Johnny Rotten, he played at Winterland at what ended up being the final Sex Pistols gig. (Winterland is gone now but was located just 8 blocks west of the Regency Center.) At the end of that night he famously asked the audience, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” No one felt that way at the Regency Center – Lydon actually thanked the crowd for being so respectful! There were moments when he even encouraged them to sing along.

   Lydon has returned to the City many times since then, most notably in 1984, when Pil played at a book release party for “RE/SEARCH 8/9: J.G. BALLARD.” It was in one of dock warehouses at Fort Mason. There were live S&M scenarios for people to check out as soon as they walked in. Further inside there were two wrecked automobiles that V. Vale had procured from a junkyard and mounted on top of each other like copulating bugs. It was a tribute to Ballard’s novel “Crash,” and was complete with a nurse and car crash victims covered in blood. Later a ram-car constructed by Survival Research Labs was brought in to assault the vehicles. The whole time there were multi-media projections of horrific images of forensic pathology on the walls. And then, after all that, Public Image came out and played their set.

Malcolm Mclaren’s recent death revived the discussion of the early days of punk, and of who really deserved credit for the Sex Pistols sound and image. But at the Regency Center on April 17th, all that mattered was that Lydon has survived and continued to grow as a person and an artist, and has remaining true to his punk roots and aesthetics. And for those who were there to experience it, this was yet another historic concert San Francisco. 

 For more info about this and other Pil shows, including live videos, check out the band’s website:

http://www.pilofficial.com/info.html

My first reaction to “Riot” was that it reminded me of the stage version of “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.” That was perhaps inevitable – they had similar settings, and both felt claustrophobic. In the second act, though, things took off in a different direction. The ending was quite a surprise. I didn’t think of at the time, but afterward I realized that it had a similar feeling to George Bernard Shaw’s “Heartbreak House.” I’ve only seen that play once, a few years back at Berkeley Rep. It was a long play, and I don’t remember much about it, but the ending was unforgettable. It has been described as being “apocalyptic,” and that was be an appropriate description of the final moments of “Riot.”

The cast was great. Some of them had been in England last year and had worked with the playwright. The patients at the institution were played by high school students, and the people running the place were played by the ACT graduate students.The first act set up who the characters were, and the second act had more emphasis on telling the story. At times, as I was watching, I was trying to remember who was in there for what reason and what their particular psychological problem was. But as the play neared its conclusion that didn’t seem to matter.

In the days since I have seen “Riot” I have been thinking about it a lot. I am still trying to understand my feelings about what happened on stage that afternoon, but that’s okay. It was a powerful and worthwhile experience, and one that I will not soon forget. 

Pax, Vox

http://www.act-sf.org/0910/riot/index.html

 On Friday night, March 19^th, I saw the ACT Conservatory Class of 2010 do a new (to me) play called “Oh Lovely Glowworm; or Great Scenes of Beauty,“ written by Glen Berger. As usual for an ACT play at the Zeum Theater the set was quite spectacular. It was like the Borg home world (from “Star Trek: Next Generation”) or one of the “Matrix” movies. But this was a fantasy, not science fiction, that took place in Europe around the time of World War I. The characters included a talking stuffed goat, a mermaid, and Irish soldiers. It was a good play for the Equinox – the characters kept dying and coming back to life, there were overlapping stories that would end and then start over again later, and there was a general theme involving a major cultural shift happening.

 Of course most of that was not really apparent to me till a couple of days later, after I’d had time to think about it. While I was watching “Glowworm” I was just enjoying the story and the talented cast. It was three hours long but went by quickly.

(I’d also like to mention that last fall ACT Conservatory opened up a new studio theater at 77 Geary, on the sixth floor of an office building. The first show I saw there was Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love,” and it instantly became my favorite new performance space in town. It’s intimate! That play is so tightly written and visceral, and the cast of four just ripped into it and made it happen. When it was over I felt exhilarated.)

On Saturday, March 20, the actual day of the Equinox, I went to SF State to see a version of “Romeo and Juliet,” which was just called “Juliet,” and had a cast of six women and one man – all of them playing Juliet. It was marvelous much, a character study exploring different aspects of her personality, thoughts and feelings. That was quite interesting. I have seen recent productions of “Romeo and Juliet” where Juliet herself seemed to have gotten lost somewhere in the rehearsal and directing process. And hey, it’s her story, right? It was nice to see her as the center of attention, presented as being complex and surprising. 

They also brought in other characters to tell the basic plot, using some of Shakespeare’s best dialogue and scenes and combining them with dance, improvisation, and newly written material. So it was both a performance of the play and something else at the same time. There was a great mix of movement with sound and/or music. It all worked really well.

I have featured two school performances in this blog. I don’t really make a distinction between professional, school and other types of productions – all that matters to me is if I enjoyed the show. Both ACT Conservatory and SF State School of Creative Arts have staged many excellent productions in the years that I have been an active Bay Area Theatre-goer. I would have written about State’s recent, and awesome, “Twelfth Night” if my blog hadn’t been in the Underworld with Persephone. But now it’s Spring; my blog has returned, and I am once again writing about the pleasures of theatre. Excelsior!

Pax,

Vox