For readers born since 1990, nuclear fear may be a concept hard to access. Thermonuclear war is something out of cheesy old movies or video games, and nuclear power is a running joke on The Simpsons. Even older generations that saw those movies without irony — on any given day nuclear apocalypse was possibly […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
It’s the Top
In the Cole Porter musical comedy Anything Goes, now on stage at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, Billy Crocker (played by Erik Standifird) is in love with young socialite Hope Harcourt (Keili Simmons Marble). But he’s just the young assistant to a Wall Street patrician (Howard Lang), and she is engaged to a […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists
Kay Larson makes a convincing case that, after gathering particular artistic and philosophical strands together from others, John Cage added his own insights and innovations to become a dominant influence in 20th century arts. Those insights were primarily from his understanding of Zen Buddhism, and it is Larson’s singular contribution that as a Zen practitioner, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Staging the Holidays
Over the past several seasons we’ve had our Charles Dickens’ yuletide, our Lewis Carroll holidays and last year’s recession-conscious Christmas. This year’s holiday stage shows have more variety and less of a coincidental theme. A bit of the recession still lingers in two musicals with roots in the 1930s, but there are also holiday fantasies […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War
1940s movies and domestic propaganda put an understandably noble face on Allied efforts in World War II. It was only in the decades afterwards that some of the morally questionable and transparently brutal counterevidence emerged: not just the Holocaust and Japanese Army atrocities, but the British firebombing of undefended Dresden, the American terror bombing […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Sherlock: Season 2
Over the past century Sherlock Holmes has not been long absent from stage or screen, but he’s currently everywhere, from a motion picture franchise (with Robert Downey, Jr.) to a new CBS television series (Elementary, which I deduce will not last long). And that’s apart from Holmes mutations on The Mentalist and Law and […]
Posted inArts + Scene
It’s Not Easy Reliving Bush
Dusty and the Big Bad World, now on stage at Redwood Curtain, is loosely based on real events: the 2005 decision by PBS — under pressure from the Bush administration — not to air a segment of a children’s program (Postcards From Buster) dealing with lesbian parents. Playwright Cusi Cram, who worked for an associated […]
Posted inArts + Scene
More than Humboldt Honeys
Women of the Northwest, on stage at the Arcata Playhouse, celebrates 14 or so individual women in local history. But in performance, the lively, inventive and relatively brief vignettes about them do something more: They shine a different light on that history itself. Many of these women are appropriately remembered for individual accomplishments. Elta Cartwright, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
John F. Kennedy
I turned 14 the summer Senator John F. Kennedy was nominated for president, and I participated in my first political campaign. I had relatives I could visit in Washington D.C. to see the inaugural parade in January, and by luck and pluck that weekend I was one of the first non-dignitaries to shake hands with […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Women Ruhl
Edison’s electricity was just beginning to transform middle class American life in the early 20th century. This is the setting for In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) by Sarah Ruhl, now on stage at Ferndale Repertory Theatre. The fictional Dr. Givings (played convincingly by Calder Johnson) has designed what today would be known […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Fore Play, Anyone?
It was a chilly summer here on the North Coast but the early autumn is warm and sunny, so maybe it’s appropriate that the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka has begun its 29th season with a summer stock comedy about golf, The Fox on the Fairway. This 2010 play by Ken Ludwig is given […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Do You Want to Know A Secret?
Long ago and far away, I was party to a conversation between two multi-talented and wise women of American drama, Corinne Jacker and Patricia Cobey. Lingering by a stone wall, gazing at the Atlantic Ocean in the fading light of a long summer day at the O’Neill Center playwrights conference in Connecticut, they talked […]