ASHLAND, Ore.—Theatergoers have plenty of thoughtful and entertaining options for live performances this season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Bill Rauch, the festival’s artistic director, is directing two of the 11 plays, which include three world premieres and one U.S.… Continue Reading
ASHLAND, Ore. – Our theatrical neighboring town to the north recently kicked off its 2013 season with a new executive director at the helm of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Cynthia Rider, a Kansas City native, has stepped into the considerable… Continue Reading
ASHLAND, Ore. – In all the scrambling done this summer by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival when a beam cracked in its largest indoor venue, one of the productions unaffected was a darkly intimate portrayal of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” The 400-year-old… 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
“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
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