The Little Shop of Horrors musical has do-wopped its way onto the North Coast Repertory Theatre stage. With fine singing, comic performances, clever set and costumes and an impressive puppet-monster, it’s a diverting evening of live entertainment. With music tied to its early ’60s origins in a cult Roger Corman film, a combination Motown trio/Greek […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
This Season in Ashland
Even before Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom made his name on Broadway, playwright August Wilson was intent on avoiding the all-too-common fate of a one-play career. For that crucial second play he also gave himself a specific challenge: to follow the eccentric structure and multiple focus of Ma Rainey with a more conventional narrative centered on […]
Posted inMusic
Collision Course (Star Trek Academy)
Book by William Shatner with Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. Pocket Books. A year from now a new Star Trek movie will be hitting the big screens, featuring new young actors playing Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and the rest of the original series crew, in a prequel to the TV series. J.J. Abrams (creator of the […]
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The Political Stage
The theatre of politics is pretty obvious in this presidential campaign year, but politics in theatre — that is, political and social issues of current concern as subject matter — is also especially evident on North Coast stages in 2008. Several plays written in another time encouraged reflection on pertinent issues of today — and […]
Posted inMusic
Sixty Days and Counting
Book by Kim Stanley Robinson. Bantam Dell. This is the third and concluding volume of Kim Stanley Robinson’s trilogy about an alternate present or near future when the world is forced to face a catastrophic climate crisis. But this isn’t another apocalyptic dread-feast. Extraordinary events shape and bend the everyday, but they don’t break it. […]
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Freaks Are Really Greeks?
Theatre can be most alive when it is rough and unfinished. Some of the most exciting performances I’ve witnessed have been staged readings, script-in-hand or living room cold readings. But what I saw and heard last week at the Arcata Playhouse is more than the raw and even intuitive attempt to explore dramatic material — […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Hair and Other Stylings
Unlike any shows before and few since, the musical Hair was produced in several U.S. cities at the same time it was still on Broadway. I saw it in San Francisco in 1969. I had a friend in the cast, who’d been the lead in the play I wrote and directed at college a year […]
Posted inMusic
Slings and Arrows
DVD, Acorn Media. Slings and Arrows was an award-winning Canadian TV series that ran for three seasons there and on pay cable in the U.S., ending last year. The DVDs are showing up now in area video stores, with all 18 episodes available as a set. Set in a Stratford (or even Oregon Shakespeare Festival) […]
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All’s Not Well
With great playwrights and great plays comes great responsibility. All’s Well That Ends Well may not be Shakespeare’s greatest comedy, but it is at least as great as some of his plays that are performed more often. It’s full of ideas and ironies (which may well include the title). The story is rooted in ancient […]
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‘The Golden State’ Heads South: Dell’Arte returns to L.A.
"It was a performance in Los Angeles in 1981 that kind of put Dell’Arte on the map," Michael Fields, the Dell’Arte Company’s producing artistic director, recalled last week. "We were doing Intrigue at Ah-Pah at the Odyssey Theatre." After the first weekend, when Fields was sleeping on a borrowed floor, someone handed him a copy […]
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Fear On Trial
Two things occurred to me before I saw 12 Angry Men at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre. First, that once you find yourself in the jury pool in Humboldt County you can pretty much count on getting called to the court house every damn year. That doesn’t happen everywhere. So some sizeable proportion of those seeing […]
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Marat Magnificent at NCRT
Presenting Marat/Sade this season at North Coast Repertory Theatre was an inspired decision. As directed by Peter Brook in 1964, this play by Peter Weiss was an international sensation. I recall listening spellbound in my college campus coffee shop to a young professor’s description of the 1965 Broadway production. But though it was revolutionary and […]