The recent Robert Downey, Jr. feature film is the latest screen incarnation of the iconic detective Sherlock Holmes. But the definitive portrayal is arguably still Jeremy Brett’s, in the British television series of 41 Holmes stories made over a decade, ending in 1994. The remastered versions in the DVD series reveal much more than the […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Rent-a-Pirate
In 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera called The Pirates of Penzance premiered, not in London, but in New York, arguably influencing the development of the American musical. A little more than a century later, Jonathan Larson’s rock opera Rent made New York its subject and changed musical theatre everywhere. Outstanding homegrown productions of both […]
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To Kill A Mockingbird
This is the 50th anniversary year for one of the most beloved and enduring American novels. The success of To Kill A Mockingbird was immediate, winning the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it remains among the top 10 best selling novels of these 50 years. It is also one of the five most assigned […]
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Designing Grandparents
North Coast Repertory Theatre seems intent on recapitulating my life this season. First they disinterred the Sisters of Charity from my grade school in Doubt, although the sight of a forelock peeking out from a stage nun’s bonnet was surprisingly scandalous. We used to wonder whether nuns even had hair. It seemed possible the Sisters […]
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Fortune’s Fools
The mysterious Madame Rosa, whose unveiled name is Maude, is a young fortune-teller with a phony accent and an identity crisis. Her mother and grandmother, predecessors in the divination biz, convinced her of ironclad fate. But she longs for other possibilities. Jeremy is a sweet but suicidal accountant, tired of being unloved and apparently unlovable, […]
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Bottom of the Ninth
Major League baseball was the most popular national sport for a long time. A lot of factors went into changing that status, but Michael Shapiro makes a particular case for what happened in this “inside baseball” book. According to Shapiro, 1960 was the year that baseball blew its opportunity to remain America’s dominant sport by […]
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Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Viewers of KEET may be forgiven if from time to time they conclude that they’ve stumbled on the Jane Austen Channel. In recent years PBS and the BBC have filmed five of her novels and a new biography, following the international success of the Pride and Prejudice miniseries of 1995, which author Claire Harman credits […]
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Top Opera
It’s 1910, early days in Blue Lake. Big civic problems are hogs in the street and the lack of a fire hose. But there’s a train station, and a lake (kind of). Enter the woodsmen, suspicious of townies, singing manfully as they bisect a redwood. The town is run by the Odd Fellows lodge and […]
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Comedy of Hope
The Prize of Hope, a kind of international lifetime achievement award for live theatre as a popular and accessible art form, will be presented at Dell’Arte this Saturday as part of the annual Mad River Festival. Given annually by Denmark’s Institute for Popular Theatre in partnership with Dell’Arte, its presentation alternates between the two hosts. […]
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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
San Francisco-based author Rebecca Solnit explores how people responded to historical and contemporary disasters, from the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake to Hurricane Katrina. Her two principal findings contradict conventional expectations, and in Katrina particularly, suggest that what we think we know through media coverage is pretty close to dead wrong. From movies and TV as […]
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Our Hero: Superman on Earth
The first of the superheroes has been bending steel with his bare hands since 1932, in comics, animation, on radio and television and in movies. Now even as Smallville, the latest in a string of popular TV series, may be ending, another feature film is coming: a reboot by Chris Nolan, director of the successful […]
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Mod Couple
In some ways, Same Time Next Year is the quintessential ’70s play. The ’70s were when the ’60s made it to suburbia, and to Middle America generally. Vietnam protest, the Generation Gap, the Sexual Revolution, Women’s Liberation, encounter groups, open marriage and a skyrocketing divorce rate — all of it really happened in the decade […]