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. – 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
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
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
The hundreds of bankers boxes piled nearly to the ceiling on the stage of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “The Language Archive” represent the enormity and uniqueness of human communication.
Inside the boxes, we’re led to assume, are the results of painstaking efforts to record and chronicle disappearing languages. We learn early of … Continue Reading
If you like glitzy entertainment that pushes the boundaries of silly, you’ll feel right at home in the Parisian apartment of hypochondriac Argan.
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s production of “The Imaginary Invalid” – which opened in late February and runs through Nov. 6 — is an over-the-top adaptation of 17th century French … Continue Reading
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