Several blocks from where a royal henchman cleverly castigates Shakespeare to his face in Redwood Curtain’s Equivocation (“Unequivocal Success,” Sept. 11), some contemporary Americans (and a distinguished ghost) are conflicted about the Bard in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet, now onstage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka. After the TV series that […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Unequivocal Success
It is 1606 and the chief minister to the new English king, James I, commissions the most popular playwright of the day to write a play about the notorious Gunpowder Plot that sought to blow up the Parliament building while the king and his family were there. That playwright is William “Shagspeare” — one of […]
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A Midsummer Night’s Stage
When the play calls for an enchanted forest, why try to fake it on a stage, when you can take the stage to the forest? That’s the solution in the Plays in the Park production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, now at Arcata’s Redwood Park. Down the grassy hill from Arcata Community Forest, tucked […]
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Thoroughly Postmodern Millie
From the opening tableau of a 1920s Manhattan street scene that fills the Van Duzer Theatre stage, the Humboldt Light Opera Company production of Thoroughly Modern Millie has the look, the pace and the pizzazz of Broadway. It has all the elements of a big classic musical: vibrant costumes (by Caroline Allander, Madeline Myers and […]
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The More Things Change
The Poor of New York, now on stage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, is a mid-19th century American melodrama, a classic of its kind. The story involves the machinations of an unscrupulous banker (played by David Simms) and his daughter (Brittney Sky Webber), and the effects of their manipulations on a family driven […]
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Friendship, Art and Endurance
It’s not an ordinary book, with crisp black type on slick snow-white paper. It consists of stitched rags and metal fragments left from the grenades the women in a Nazi slave labor camp were forced to drill. It is a book of simple domestic images with personal meaning, small enough to hide from the guards, […]
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Trouble in Chekhovania
Imagine — as playwright Christopher Durang did — that two American parents who are also college professors name their three children after characters in famous plays by Anton Chekhov. The result is the 2012 comedy Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka. Additional inspiration came when Durang […]
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The Korbel Conspiracy
Since 1992 there have been five episodes (including an unnumbered one) in Dell’Arte’s soap opera saga of the working-class Dugan family in the fictional North Coast mill town of Korbel. Korbel V: The Secret, now on stage in the outdoor Rooney Amphitheatre at Dell’Arte in Blue Lake, is intended both as a continuation and “an […]
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The Big Mad
For more than a generation, it’s been mad in Blue Lake in June, ever since Dell’Arte created the Mad River Festival of stage performances. The festival got pretty hefty for a while in the ’90s, and in more recent years it’s been smaller. But this year it’s bigger than ever, absorbing seven weeks of the […]
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Baritones on the Barricades
Les Miserables, the musical now on stage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, opened on Broadway with expensive grandeur. In his 1987 review, New York Times critic Frank Rich noted the revolving stage and the prodigious lighting and stage effects that included tilting towers and a floor that peeled back “to create the illusion […]
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On the Edge
Toward the end of their final year, Dell’Arte International School MFA candidates are asked, “What are you compelled by?” For 10 weeks they work in groups to create pieces that answer that question, according to the school’s director, Ronlin Foreman. Then they develop these pieces in front of audiences at the annual Thesis Festival, which […]
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Imperfect Love
Humboldt Light Opera Company typically mounts a big production in late summer and a smaller musical in spring, often staged at College of the Redwoods with accompaniment by a single pianist. Meanwhile, Redwood Curtain, which tends to specialize in contemporary “relationship” comedies, occasionally does a small musical with that theme. A few years ago the […]