David Jervis

Phantom of the Opera traces its lineage back to to a 1910 novel of the same name by French author Gaston Leroux. For many people, the point of creation for the story is either the classic 1925 silent film starring Lon Cheney or the 1943 talkie with Claude Rains. But let’s face it, the best-known […]

The traveling stage family was once a commonplace American archetype, from high classical theater to Shakespearean companies taking dusty journeys around the 19th-century frontier, and then onto the scrappy times of the vaudeville circuit and beyond. From the esteemed Barrymore family, its descendants alive and tweeting to this day, to the semi-fictionalized mother and daughters […]

The Big Thirst It’s been said that water is today’s oil/gold/your choice of valuable commodity. Water is a lot simpler — and a lot more complicated — than that. It may be just endlessly recycled dinosaur pee, but it’s also integral to the web of life — something we’ve become all too aware of in […]

The motion picture Reefer Madness has spent so much time as a camp classic that it’s sometimes easy to forget it was once presented with a straight face in 1936 as an educational film financed outside of the studio system, before being recut into different versions and re-released all across the land by notorious exploitation […]

The people and legacy of Ireland have long loomed large in literature, cinema and the stage. So much so, that with its elements of sorrow, longing, upheaval and loss, it can risk veering into well-trod territory, or even cliché, never mind that these are vital moving parts to the historical character of the people. And […]

Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, known formally as Der Ring des Nibelungen, is a four-part gesamtkunstwerk (bear with me here) from the mid-19th century that is staged in four parts with a total running time of up to 16 hours. It isn’t something that’s overwhelmingly familiar to most people — outside of opera fanatics — in […]