Ashland, 2012: Misalliances Under the Sadie Hawkins rules of Leap Year, romantic initiative becomes a wide-open free-for-all. No wonder if the course of true love gets even more roiled than usual. Apt, then, that in the current leap year the… Continue Reading
Amanda Dehnert’s Ashland production – by far the most powerful and original “Julius Caesar” I’ve seen – is like a jolt of black coffee: dark, strong, bitter, pungent. A nerve-jangling wake-up call; a bleak play for bleak times. To set… Continue Reading
What makes this world-premiere production so gripping is the same kind of prurient interest that might make us, in spite of ourselves, pick up a Murdoch tabloid: it “hacks” its way into an “inside” view of a “true” story, an under-the-skin peek at the turmoil of very well-known people in the throes of very public – and lurid – trauma.
In “Ghost Light,” the celebrity in question is noted theater guru Jonathan Moscone, artistic helmsman of the California Shakespeare Festival. And the lurid trauma is the 1978 murder of his father, San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. But what elevates this major new play, ethically and aesthetically, above the level of Fox News sleaze is that here the hacking is introspective, delving beyond sensational superficialities to tap the deepest spiritual wellsprings of its characters. Continue Reading
Upfront disclosure: of all Shakespeare’s comedies, “Love’s Labor’s Lost” has long been the most elusive for me. I never understood the characters’ motivations or how the seemingly random sub-plots fit together. Like why would a quartet of yeasty young noblemen… Continue Reading
“Break a leg!” That’s what actors traditionally wish each other as a contrarian mantra against stage fright. But when the main roof beam of Ashland’s 700-seat Bowmer Theater cracked a couple of weeks ago, the fracture frighted not just the… Continue Reading
If you head west tonight or this weekend to see “Mary Jane: The Musical” – which I heartily recommend – be sure to dress warm. Not just for the coastal fog but also for the miasma of pot smoke that… Continue Reading
“Twelfth Night” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). Director Darko Tresnjak, an Oregon Shakespeare Festival neophyte, comes to the festival with a long list of credits from other top theaters, including several opera companies. His operatic pedigree shows in this crowd-pleasing,… Continue Reading
In case you thought of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) in Ashland as just a summer extravaganza, you could be missing out on some of the prime (but relatively unsung) joys of life here in Jefferson State. Even though they… Continue Reading
Anybody who’s ever had – or been – a kid can probably remember those mix-and-match picture books with pages split three ways: a set of miscellaneous heads, assorted midriffs and a selection of feet or tails. The joy of it… Continue Reading
If you’ve only ever seen plummy Brit-accented versions of Shakespeare, wait until you hear the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Robin Goodrin Nordli drawl “… by the all-hail hereafter!/ …transported beyond/ This ignorant present, … I feel now/ The future in the… Continue Reading
Recent Comments