Ever notice the Shakespearean acclimatization effect? How the Mind’s Ear can so quickly “go native” in Elizabethan/Jacobean English? At the opening curtain of a Shakespeare revival, typically, you feel the actors might as well be speaking Telugu. Fifteen minutes later,… Continue Reading
The closest approximation of a homegrown, made in U.S.A. uhr-myth has to be The Wizard of Oz. The L. Frank Baum children’s classic – the saga of a Kansas pre-teen, tornado-tossed into a surreal dream world where she befriends talking… Continue Reading
Upfront disclosure: Mei-lang and I had never heard of the Go-Go’s until we settled into seats G19 and G21 of Ashland’s outdoor Allen Elizabethan Theater. We opened our Playbills to learn that the new musical “Head Over Heels,” which is… Continue Reading
…That’s the new genre that Pulitzer-winning playwright Qiara Alegría Hudes has perfected in “The Happiest Song Plays Last,” the final installment of her trilogy about her Iraq vet cousin Elliot and his ongoing internet-enabled ties with his Puerto Rican family… Continue Reading
From the time you first meet them, cavorting together on a royal-sized bed, the thing you notice about Derrick Lee Weeden’s Marc Antony and Miriam Laube’s Cleopatra is their physical disparity. He’s enormous — by turns the hulking “triple pillar… Continue Reading
In this, our Age of the Selfie, why shouldn’t the drama be as solipsistic as any other cultural artifact? Hence the proliferation, nowadays, of plays about players and playwrights. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), ever in the vanguard, has served… Continue Reading
In the five years since he’s moved to Ashland, director Christopher Liam Moore has distinguished himself bringing American modernist theater to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF). He’s made full use of the Bowmer Theater, OSF’s hi-tech proscenium stage, to project… Continue Reading
From Shaw’s “Pygmalion” to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” we, as audiences, love to see confirmed bachelors or bachelorettes inveigled into marriage. The more louche or outré the singleton the better. It somehow ratifies the sweetness, rightness and inevitability of our… Continue Reading
Before it heads off to Broadway — and, likely, to another round of prestigious plaudits and prizes — we in NorCal still have a few more weeks to head up to Ashland for the world premiere of “The Great Society,”… Continue Reading
Some five centuries before Canadian shrink Robert Hare devised his famous psychometric assay of psychopathy, William Shakespeare had already delineated the syndrome with clinical precision in his portrayal of Richard III (1452-1485), England’s last Plantagenet king. “Glib charm, grandiosity, shameless… Continue Reading
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