Kurt Vonnegut became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for novels such as Cat’s Cradle, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater and especially Slaughterhouse Five. A countercultural hero, in later years he was a popular speaker and a much-banned author in schools across the country. He was a gallows humorist who took a cosmic view, a […]
William S. Kowinski
Posted inArts + Scene
Yule Tales
What’s behind the coincidences of Christmas shows? There are perennial themes such as family and Christmas itself, as exemplified this year by A Christmas Story at Ferndale Rep, and Eugene Stickland’s Some Assembly Required at HSU, which could be considered a slightly askew sequel. (I wonder if audiences anywhere else in North America have the […]
Posted inArts + Scene
I’m With the Bears: Short Stories from a Damaged Planet
As noted in Bill McKibben’s introduction, this collection of 10 stories arrives in the growing shadow of the Climate Crisis. But these are not stories primarily about the Climate Crisis, and only a few mention specific manifestations. Instead they are meant to illuminate (as McKibben says), “not to push us in some particular direction.” Still, […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Murder Most Fun
Though Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time, I suspect most of us now know her stories principally from the many television and movie versions. Christie herself adapted a dozen or so of her stories for the stage, sometimes ruthlessly. She staged three stories starring her famous detective, Hercule Poirot, but eliminated […]
Posted inArts + Scene
On Stage Over the Holidays
Coming to North Coast stages are celebrations of the holidays and plays about the complications of families celebrating the holidays. Dell’Arte begins the celebratory season with its annual series of (mostly) free holiday shows, beginning Nov. 25. This year the Dell’Arte Company takes on the season’s high art standard, The Nutcracker, but with a low […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Great Leader
Jim Harrison has written a police procedural? The author of historical family sagas like Legends of the Fall, whose last novel was entitled The English Major? Like that one, this new novel is about a solitary man in his 60s dealing with his changing life, but here he’s a retiring detective obsessed with one last […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Last Five Musicals
The Last Five Years, now on stage at Redwood Curtain in Eureka, is the fifth musical produced on the North Coast since August, and the 11th since last September (if you count the two Mozart operas along with the three Sondheims and the two Lerner and Loewes). It’s even the second time in that period […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Red Power Rising: The National Indian Youth Council and the Origins of Native Activism
The usual narrative of Native American activism begins with Alcatraz and the American Indian Movement in the late 1960s. But scholar Bradley Shreve makes a persuasive case that activism was rooted in earlier decades, and specifically that much of its character was established through an organization founded in the early 1960s: the National Indian Youth […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Slap Steps
The 39 Steps is most famously a movie made by Alfred Hitchcock in England, before he relocated to Hollywood. It was preceded by the John Buchan novel and followed by several other film and TV versions, all from the UK. The 2005 play of The 39 Steps by Patrick Barlow now on stage at Ferndale […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Lively Woods
Another opening, another Sondheim musical. For the current North Coast Repertory Theatre production of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, Calder Johnson’s wide and mostly open set, festooned with woodsy red leaves, signals an airy difference from the cramped and dark London of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, as produced last month at Ferndale Rep. This is a brighter […]
Posted inArts + Scene
On Stage in October
At Dell’Arte for two weekends beginning Thursday (Sept. 28), the physical comedy ensemble Under the Table presents The Hunchbacks of Notre Dame. Yes, that’s “hunchbacks” plural (three to be precise.) It’s an adaptation of the Victor Hugo classic created in Blue Lake with Dell’Arte’s Ronlin Foreman. It’s performed in the Carlo, Thursdays through Saturdays at […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Why Marx Was Right
I suspect no American academic would dare write a book with this title, for fear of losing the comforts of tenure for a cell at Guantanamo. But in the UK at least, the previously influential works of Karl Marx are being reevaluated for contemporary relevance — especially now that capitalism is not proving to be […]