This year’s Mad River Festival kicked off on a rather different note than previous years. Instead of the usual biting satirical drama, Dell’Arte is celebrating someone who’s been a key part of more than 50 Dell’Arte productions in Blue Lake and around the world. Indeed, if you’ve listened to any music created, recorded or performed […]
Front Row
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In Transition
Thesis Festival Dell’Arte’s annual Thesis Festival represents the graduating MFA students’ transition to the world beyond school — a world to which they will bring the totality of their three-year immersion in theater of place. The four pieces presented are all very different, reflecting the broad range of techniques studied, but all also very much […]
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Happy Families
The Fantastic Mr. Fox The best writers of children’s books tend to come from rather curious backgrounds and Roald Dahl had that part of the CV down pat. A global traveler from childhood, through his life he crossed paths with royalty, movie stars and even 007 creator Ian Fleming. He wrote poetry, prose and screenplays […]
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Who Wants to be 15 Again?
Playwright John Patrick Shanley describes 15 as a “special, beautiful room. In hell,” in Prodigal Son, now playing at Redwood Curtain Theatre. The play sets a teenage boy’s search for identity against a background of the complex mores and philosophies in a small private Catholic preparatory school. The result is a multifaceted coming-of-age story in […]
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A Shakespearean Tragedy-Comedy Cocktail
The Winter’s Tale The canon of William Shakespeare is mostly discussed by superfans and laypeople alike as split between dramas — be they blood-soaked epics of kings or more intimate affairs — and comic frolics. There are a few that can’t be filed away so neatly. The Winter’s Tale, now onstage at North Coast Repertory […]
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The Women Have It
It’s International Women’s Day this Friday, March 8, so it’s particularly appropriate that Humboldt theater-goers have two very different female-centric productions to choose from. At Humboldt State University’s Gist Hall Theatre is José Rivera’s Adoration of the Old Woman, a well-crafted envisioning of Puerto Rico’s future through the eyes of a young woman, her great-grandmother, […]
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Who’s Who?
Buddhism tells us that we are like a bunch of flowers: When we die, we become the raw material to make new flowers. But the original is never coming back. What we, the audience, want to do with this little gem is what the Usher (a friendly, matter-of-fact Jeff Cooper) asks us to consider (along […]
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Old Haunts
We’ve all been there. You’re a middle-aged “retired” (read, talentless) dancer, furtively packing to leave your husband for the umpteenth time, trying to convince your brother this one will stick while he blathers on about his fleet-footed fiancée. Oh, you haven’t? In that case, you may not identify with the setting of Ferndale Repertory Theater’s […]
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Border Dispute
Neighbors can be odd. Next-door neighbors even more so. You’re not under the same roof, like siblings. But you are expected to get along with them, albeit for reasons of geography rather than genetics, and, like family, you don’t always get to choose them. In the comedy Native Gardens by Karen Zacarias, the first offering […]
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The Aftermath of Wars
The Vietnam War shaped Eric Hollenbeck. American “missions” in Iraq, Afghanistan and countless others since have shaped generations of veterans who struggle to function in a world that has little or no understanding of their experiences. Radioman, currently playing at Dell’Arte’s Carlo Theatre in Blue Lake, is a powerful tribute to those veterans that will […]
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Space Force
As a Brit, I’m a sucker for a good pantomime and this year’s offering at the Arcata Playhouse is up there with the best. Robin Hood – Knight of the Stars: A Space-Capade is a space-capade of the highest comedic order. It has everything a good panto should — a ludicrously over-costumed and over-made up […]
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Fra-gee-lay Nostalgia
Taking place just after the Great Depression in a small Indiana town, the 1983 movie A Christmas Story tells the tale of one young man’s fevered quest for a toy firearm. It’s quaint, blackly funny and a yule-tide classic. The musical reworking, A Christmas Story: The Musical, currently showing at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre, carries […]