Nobody ever said finding a mate was easy. In some places, the absence of suitable suitors or a dating pool up to snuff is more prevalent than elsewhere. Heck, I’ve even heard some whispers that Humboldt County isn’t ideal. In Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore, ladies and lads gone lacking for love serves as a jumping-off […]
David Jervis
David Jervis is a freelance writer living in Arcata. He prefers he/him pronouns.
Posted inArts + Scene
Alternative Farce
The truth is a tricky thing. It can be objective or subjective, slippery or elusive. It can be deep and bitter and hard to hear. It is rarely absolute. More rarely, it can be very funny. Now, lying — that’s funny. Not so much when it’s done to you but in the service of comedy, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Drag King
Drag shows, and even drag itself, are in a sense as old as theater itself, for varied reasons ranging back countless centuries. Be it a lack of female performers for female roles or plays with plot points involving men dressed as women, history has not suffered for a lack of men in dresses. But the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Hello, Sailor
The genre of light opera may seem like an odd one to 21st century audiences but only if you think about it too much. Productions in that niche pop up on theater calendars everywhere from high schools to Broadway. It can be tricky for small productions with all the singing the genre indicates. Light opera […]
Posted inArts + Scene
By the Horns
Beauty and the Beast has evolved into some sort of larger-than-life thing of its own in the past quarter century. It really owes all this to Disney’s 1991 animated film, the gigantic success of which helped jump-start the company’s nearly dormant animated movie division. Under the laws of nature, there was no reason to stop […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Bloody End
The final years of Richard of Gloucester, in which he became Richard III and was crowned king of England, were violent, tumultuous ones. They served as the final chapter of the War of the Roses, a bloody bit of business that spanned about three decades in late 15th century England. William Shakespeare’s Richard III, first […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Family Circles
Don’t hold Eleemosynary‘s title against it. It’s a clever device by playwright Lee Blessing (whose Going to St. Ives was a popular production at Redwood Curtain Theatre last year) that plays into the content of the piece. It means “charitable” and it is the winning word in a national spelling contest. Eleemosynary, now playing at […]
Posted inArts + Scene
O-o-oklahoma!
The play Oklahoma! and I go back a ways. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s famed play was, at the age of 8, the very first live theater I ever saw. My family was on a summer camping trip near Santa Cruz, and my parents took my sisters and I into town one night to see […]
Posted inArts + Scene
A Country Murder
The mystery novel, that great niche of fiction, has no greater name to represent it than the late Agatha Christie. North Coast Repertory Theatre’s The Hollow is a staging of a Christie-penned play that made its London debut in 1951 and is based on her book of the same name from five years earlier. One […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Rocky of Ages
I have a long relationship with the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I’ll try to keep short. Midnight shows as a teen in the mid-1980s were my first exposure to its live casts and hollering audience participation. Then as a manager at the Arcata Theatre in the 1990s, back in its cinema-only days, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Opposites Detract
Ahh, opposites. Not all of them exist in complete diametric opposition to one another, as many adhere closer to “one of these is not like the other” observation. Yin and yang, apples and oranges, Nirvana and Nickelback — human history has seen a very long litany of them at work. And well before the era […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Let’s be Frank
Reviews SAUSAGE PARTY. One could make an argument that Sausage Party is exactly the sort of summer movie the world needs at a time like this. A jaunt down to the local cinema is meant as a refuge from the uncertain, shady funk of the world at large, and that outside world has been a […]