Front Row

Scholars have argued for centuries as to when, or even whether, Shakespeare wrote The Taming of the Shrew. What’s not in doubt is that John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as house playwright for the King’s Men, wrote The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed, as a sequel. This piece, completed in the early 17th century, tells […]

Did you know Neverland was a sailing ship before it was Peter Pan’s forever home? Me neither. But that’s just one of the fascinating details to emerge in Peter and the Starcatcher, Humboldt State University Theatre Department’s season opener. It’s a play with music (not a full-blown musical) that imagines a prequel to the Peter […]

I have a long relationship with the film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I’ll try to keep short. Midnight shows as a teen in the mid-1980s were my first exposure to its live casts and hollering audience participation. Then as a manager at the Arcata Theatre in the 1990s, back in its cinema-only days, […]

Ahh, opposites. Not all of them exist in complete diametric opposition to one another, as many adhere closer to “one of these is not like the other” observation. Yin and yang, apples and oranges, Nirvana and Nickelback — human history has seen a very long litany of them at work. And well before the era […]

Charles Darwin almost did not join HMS Beagle’s round-the-world voyage as the official naturalist. Professing a fear of blood, dissection and taxidermy — not to mention never having been to sea — he was an unlikely candidate for the role. But the strength of his quest for scientific knowledge prevailed, thanks to an appreciation of […]

Here on the North Coast, we are familiar with the tattooed bars on the chins of Native American women. But imagine the reaction of mid-19th century men and women seeing those markings on a white woman who appeared otherwise no different from them. That is the position Dell’Arte Community Development Director and faculty member Zuzka […]

Phantom of the Opera traces its lineage back to to a 1910 novel of the same name by French author Gaston Leroux. For many people, the point of creation for the story is either the classic 1925 silent film starring Lon Cheney or the 1943 talkie with Claude Rains. But let’s face it, the best-known […]

The traveling stage family was once a commonplace American archetype, from high classical theater to Shakespearean companies taking dusty journeys around the 19th-century frontier, and then onto the scrappy times of the vaudeville circuit and beyond. From the esteemed Barrymore family, its descendants alive and tweeting to this day, to the semi-fictionalized mother and daughters […]

It’s the superficially idyllic 1950s in post-war Middle America. The role of women is to be decorative and do good works. Lesbianism does not exist (after all, Queen Victoria said so). The only dark cloud threatening this Eden is the Red Menace. And so it is that we find ourselves, as members of the audience, […]

The Big Thirst It’s been said that water is today’s oil/gold/your choice of valuable commodity. Water is a lot simpler — and a lot more complicated — than that. It may be just endlessly recycled dinosaur pee, but it’s also integral to the web of life — something we’ve become all too aware of in […]

The motion picture Reefer Madness has spent so much time as a camp classic that it’s sometimes easy to forget it was once presented with a straight face in 1936 as an educational film financed outside of the studio system, before being recut into different versions and re-released all across the land by notorious exploitation […]