Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” and Tennessee Williams’ “Streetcar Named Desire” at the Angus Bowmer Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Ashland. Nell Geisslinger, an eight year OSF veteran who virtually grew up in Ashland, is hotter than ever at this year’s… Continue Reading
“The Very Merry Wives of Windsor, Iowa,” and “As You Like It,” by William Shakespeare (with assistance) at The Elizabethan Theatre, Ashland, Oregon. This season, aside from the brooding historical pageant of “Henry V,” the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) has… Continue Reading
Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Ashland, presents two by The Bard: “Henry V” on the Elizabethan Stage and “Troilus and Cressida” at the New Theater. “War,” Carl von Clausewitz assures us, is just “politics by other means.” This may have been… Continue Reading
“Medea/Macbeth/Cinderella,” at the Angus Bowmer Theater, Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), Ashland. Here’s one specially tailored for hard-core theater geeks. They were out in force and wildly appreciative at the show’s opening night in Ashland. Much of the audience seemed to… Continue Reading
ASHLAND, Ore. – It’s a bittersweet season for those behind the scenes at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After 33 seasons as executive director, Paul Nicholson will be retiring when curtains close this fall. A replacement search is underway, with the… Continue Reading
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
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
Being adrift in the entertainment doldrums of summer – Westside’s Broadway revue a couple of weeks off, Riverfront’s “Cheaper By the Dozen” not quite open (it starts Saturday, July 16), and the school year not even on the horizon –… Continue Reading
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