“How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?” When the Firesign Theatre performed that vaudeville parody, they expressed a central conundrum of quantum physics without really trying. A lot of mischief flows from the finding that, at least at the sub-atomic level, an object is created in a […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
The Craftsman
Carpenter, lab technician, cook, software designer, glassblower, poet, the maker of musical instruments, the conductor of the orchestra that plays them and the composer of the music they play — sociologist Richard Sennett calls them all craftsmen (be they female or male), and by this description the category includes a decent chunk of the Humboldt […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Don’t Forget to Remember
There are these paradoxes: theatre, like movies, TV and major-publisher literature, is increasingly created by the young, to the extent that a writer for the Dramatist Guild’s magazine felt compelled to bravely suggest that good new plays could actually be written by playwrights over the age of 30. Yet theatre audiences are consistently and increasingly […]
Posted inMusic
Gojira
It’s the movie that launched at least 30 sequels, but the original has rarely been seen in the U.S. For most Americans, Godzilla: King of the Monsters started the franchise in 1956, and things devolved from there: from the barely comprehensible mashup of Raymond Burr attempting to interact with Japanese footage to badly dubbed city-stomping […]
Posted inMusic
As You Like It
Directed by Kenneth Branagh. HBO Films. With Henry V in 1989, Kenneth Branagh burst onto the world cinema scene as a combination Orson Welles (theatre enfant terrible who directs and stars in his first major film while in his twenties) and Laurence Olivier (choosing the same play as Olivier did for his first of several […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Flight of Farce
You wind it up tight in the first act and in the second act it flies apart, only to somehow come together in the end. That’s the basic mechanism of farce, and it’s a lot harder to accomplish than it sounds. The script is of paramount importance, and if you wanted a textbook example of […]
Posted inMusic
Creature From the Black Lagoon: The Legacy Collection
Universal Has there yet been a remake of a genre classic that’s better than the original? Now they’re trying it with Creature From the Black Lagoon, slated for release next year. Do yourself a summertime favor and see all three Creature features from the 1950s, on this nifty two-disk set from Universal’s Legacy Collection series. […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Local Heroes
Opening night of Dell’Arte’s Korbel IV: The Accident saw an overflow crowd in the Rooney Amphitheatre, cheerfully engaged in the annual rites of family mini-picnics, adult wine-sipping and general bundling-up after sundown, gathered to witness the resumption of a hometown participatory soap opera with the Dell’Arte brand of comedy, music and local satire. They weren’t […]
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The Fest Begins!
This year’s Mad River Festival starts this Saturday with an appearance by Hollywood’s Tim Robbins and several other members of his L.A.-based theatre group, The Actors’ Gang, who are coming to receive the international Prize of Hope. Denmark’s Institute of Popular Theatre has been giving this award since 1987 mostly to European ensembles, but in […]
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Aspects of Tragedy
By William S. Kowinski Between Two Winters returned to the Carlo Theatre stage last weekend, not as an encore so much as an iteration — a tryout of changes before its upcoming weekend at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco. Tasked with creating and performing an Aristotelian tragedy by adapting a story from the news, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Sanskrit Comes to Ashland
With clouds of incense rising above them, the large cast in colorful costumes is arrayed in a circle. They sit on cushions and stand under lanterns, chanting and singing in a golden light. The opening of The Clay Cart, now in repertory at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, promises an exotic experience from ancient […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Story of a Marriage
By Andrew Sean Greer Farrar, Straus and Giroux We’re in a strange time in the history of the novel. It would eventually cannibalize all previous literary forms, but in England the novel began as almost satire, a playful burlesque of sermons, letters and travel narratives. It started as a popular form and prospered as such […]