The musical is not my favorite form of theatre. Yet when I look back on the past calendar year or more on the North Coast, many of the shows I’ve most admired have been musicals. This personal paradox came into view especially in the last month or so, when I saw four of them and […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inMusic
August Wilson Century Cycle
Plays by August WilsonTheatre Communications Group ‘Tis the season of the boxed set, but this one has more significance than the usual holiday gift repackaging. This is the first physical embodiment of a singular achievement — 10 plays, each set in a different decade of the 20th century, which together tell a long story of […]
Posted inMusic
Doctor Who: The Complete Third Series on DVD
BBC/Warner Home Video In terms of cultural impact, Dr. Who is the British Star Trek and Star Wars put together. The BBC-TV series about a dapper two-hearted alien traveling through time and space in what looks from the outside like a blue police box, first went on the air in 1963 and ran continuously until […]
Posted inArts + Scene
‘Fiddler’ Delights at NCRT
It seems like a long time ago now. Not only the late 19th century, when the tales about Jews in Czarist Russia written by Sholem Aleichem took place, or even 1905, when Fiddler on the Roof (based on those stories) is set. But also the early 1960s, when this musical was created — when several […]
Posted inArts + Scene
‘Othello’ in Arcata
When Venice was a great power, its most trusted military leader was Othello, a Moor. In secret, Othello wooed the daughter of a Venetian noble, Brabantio, and as the play opens their secret marriage is about to be revealed. I ago, a trusted officer who may or may not be seriously aggrieved at being passed […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Topical Theatre
In times like these that try the soul, public crises lead to private cries of conscience, and to the inquiries numbered among the obsessions of art. Theatre, arguably the most public and the most intimate of arts, inevitably responds. There are several examples this coming week on North Coast stages, each addressing a different (though […]
Posted inMusic
‘The American Discovery of Europe’ book review
*The AmericanDiscovery ofEuropeby Jack D. Forbes*Illinois University Press Did Columbus discover America, or did America discover Columbus? Did Columbus meet Native Americans for the first time in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue — an event marked, earlier this week, by Columbus Day — or did he meet two American Indians 15 years earlier, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Madness
Greedy financiers and rapacious corporate exploiters ready to do anything to get more oil to wage more war might well inspire the shock and awe of recognition, especially through the words of Jean Giradoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, currently at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka. Written in the midst of World War II, […]
Posted inMusic
The Case for Literature
The Case For Literature is the title of Gao Xingjian’s address accepting the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, and also of this slim but powerful collection of his essays. Gao achieved his first success in China in the early 1980s with plays, and continued to write for the theatre, as well as fiction and literary […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Gem of the Season
There’s a little more than a month left in the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival season, and a couple of the plays I liked and wrote about are still running ( As You Like It, Stoppard’s On the Razzle ), as well as a few I will write about later in the column (Lisa Loomer’s Distracted […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Go Straight to ‘Sideways’
For a magazine piece on the trials and tribulations of young aspiring artists in New York, I once talked to many actors and others in the theatre in different stages of their careers about their beginning years. A lot of people have had crappy jobs, but actors probably have more than most, partly because they […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Manic About Titanic — HLOC show sails into final weekend
When the basic story is so familiar, and the narrative trajectory so extravagantly simple (big unsinkable ship sinks on maiden voyage), it all depends on how it’s done. The Humboldt Light Opera Company does the musical Titanic very, very well. The production excels in every aspect, creating a stylish, polished, harmonized and entertaining whole, with […]