Results tagged “theater”

The production currently playing on the thrust stage at Berkeley Rep -- while American Idiot finishes out its raucous pre-Broadway run in the Roda Theater -- is Tiny Kushner, a collection of one-act plays written by Angels in America scribe and Pulitzer-winner Tony Kushner. The plays were all written in the 90's and 00's and originally produced in this grouping by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Though they all bear some familiar Kushner-esque markings -- psychotherapy, fictionalized portrayals of real people, fantastical premises involving the afterlife, politicized critiques of the government -- they are relatively unconnected pieces and deserve to be discussed separately. So here goes, in brief:

FILM: Filmmaker Nara Denning will be celebrating the release of her new DVD Neurotique with a premiere screening. Neurotique is a collection of six silent and tragic love stories set to live musical performances by Mister Odom & the Odom Poles, Charith Premawardhana, and Momo and Friends -Cheeskos Junction.

THEATER: Comedian and playwright Rick Reynolds presents his hilarious and gut-wrenching personal confessions and childhood remembrances in Love, God, Sex (and and other stuff I don’t have), which is directed by Jason Alexander.

DRAG: Trannyshack and Midnight Mass host Halloween: A Party, starring Heklina as "Dracula" and Peaches Christ as "Tran Hesling," with a special performance by guest star Jackie Beat and a whole line-up of other performers, including a midnight drag show by the darkest divas of Trannyshack. There will also be a costume contest judged by a celebrity panel.

What do you get when a liberal, obviously embittered playwright sets out amidst the second term of the second Bush Administration to write a political satire about a conservative, buffoon-ish, sitting president whose poll numbers rival "Ghandi's cholesterol numbers" and a lesbian speech writer who wants to marry her partner? You get "November," an already dated-feeling and minor play by the whip-smart David Mamet that plays for mostly cheap laughs and a handful of clever one-liners. [Spoiler alert: We're now going to reveal several of the play's plot points.]

THEATER: It's the first night of Ghosts of the River at Brava Theater, which runs through November 8. Incorporating actors, shadow puppets, and music with the epic writing of Octavio Solís, the play presents vignettes of those who have encountered the Rio Grande throughout time, from both sides of the divide. The performance will be bilingual with Spanish/English translation provided through subtitles.

WALKING TOUR: It's that time of year again! It's the annual Ghost Walk at City Hall. Learn all about the "disinterred remains, assassinations, and other ghostly lore" surrounding city hall. If you can't make tonight's walk, there's also the Ghost Walk at The Palace on the 30th and the Ghosts, Sinners and Secret Places on the 31st.

THEATER: There are two more preview nights for David Mamet's over-the-top comedy, November, which takes a satirical stab at American politics. The play was a Broadway success, and critics describe it as "one of the first breezy and intelligent comedies of substance we've seen in a long time" and "a hilarious, timely, decidedly un-Mamet-like laughfest." The play officially opens on Wednesday, and there are several nights this week with $10 seats available, including tonight. What a deal!

LAUNCH PARTY: Who says print is dead? We Still Like is defying this statement by releasing their very first issue, Manifesto Destiny, a manifesto-themed collection of prose, poetry, reviews, rants, and raves. The celebratory event will feature soapbox-style pontificating, manifesto-ing, and poem-ing by writers featured in the current issue. Then attendees will be invited to take a test drive in the patented Hyperbolic Chamber, outfitted to encourage all their grandiose statements and wildest dreams, courtesy of Bradford Earle.

THEATER: A new production of the Pulitzer and Tony Award Winning play The Heidi Chronicles is back at Custom Made through October 24. Heidi Holland, a successful art historian and essayist, "is driven to find joy and satisfaction, but always on her terms, trying to maintain what makes her a person as others try to make her what they want her to be."

The recent hate crime legislation coincides with the 11th anniversary of Matthew Shepard's death after he was robbed and beaten outside of Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998.

FILM: The San Francisco Zen Center hosts an evening of food, literature, and film with Alix Lambert. Lambert's new book, The Silencing, is a bi-lingual case account of six murdered Russian journalists, paired with photos of the murder sites and first-person accounts of the journalists' work and life. Her documentary, The Mark of Cain, details the role of tattoos in Russia’s criminal world, using them as a device by which to examine the role of prisons and of crime in Russia.

THEATER: Foul Play presents The Bride of Frankenstein: Live on Stage as part of their Attack of the Killer B-Movie Series. Performed entirely in black and white, the play will feature the original Franz Waxman score from the 1935 classic, and combines puppetry, shadowplay and myriad other theatricalities of a bygone era.

Theater fans may have heard about the 2008 Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific, which took home a bunch of Tony Awards including Best Revival of a Musical, Best Direction and Best Scenic Design. That production is now starting its national tour with a new cast, which kicked off this week at the Golden Gate Theater in San Francisco, and we can see what at least some of the fuss was about over the original production. It's a grand tribute to mid-twentieth century American musicals and boisterously faithful to one of the favorite scores of the genre. And with all its glorification of the unsung heroes who waited out much of WWII on quiet islands in the South Pacific, it gives modern audiences a glimpse of the rabid, just-post-war nostalgia for wartime stories that American audiences had in the late 1940s and 50s.

Noël Coward may have died thirty-six years ago, but his work remains as adaptable and relevant as ever, as proven in the second Bay Area production of a Coward play this year -- after CalShakes' Private Lives this summer. This show is Brief Encounter at the A.C.T., which is actually the name of the 1945 movie made from Coward's 1939 play Still Life, which he considered to be one of his best. The production comes direct from London and originated with the Kneehigh Theatre Company in Cornwall, who got their start in 1980 doing experimental children's theater and hence the name "kneehigh." It's directed and brilliantly adapted by Emma Rice, who brings to the show an incredible freshness of vision, complete with a number of experimental touches and a host of Noël Coward-penned songs which serve as interludes between scenes and which were never part of the original play or film.

THEATER: Catch the first preview night of the world premiere of The First Day of School, which opens SF Playhouse's seventh season. The play, which was written by Billy Aronson, creator of the original concept for the musical RENT and a writer for MTV’s Beavis and Butthead, is about a group of parents who decide to make their children’s first day of school a “first” of their own. The show's official opening night is September 26, and it runs through November 7.

MUSIC: It's a night of geographically diverse rock at Cafe Du Nord, featuring Australia's The Drones (dark/bluesy/psychedelic), Los Angeles' Model/Actress (noisy/high-energy indie rock), and SF's The Spyrals (ethereal/shoegaze/Brit-popesque). The Duke of Windsor will spin tunes between sets.

MUSIC: Tonight kicks off the 10th Annual Electronic Music Festival, which runs through Saturday and showcases "a wide array of electronic music pioneers, modern innovators, and emerging artists, ranging in diverse styles and methods from contemporary classical, glitch, music concrete, sound art, free improvisation and experimental pop." Tonight's line-up includes Miya Masaoka (New York), Lukas Ligeti (New York), and Amy X Neuburg (Oakland).

Today's cleanser comes to us via the American Conservatory Theater which has brought to town an acclaimed British production of Noël Coward's "Brief Encounter" directed by Emma Rice, which opened on Friday. We'll have a review for you soon, but first watch this trailer featuring the many multimedia effects that bring old-school, black-and-white-film melodrama to the live stage. Buy tickets here.

THEATER: ACT has joined forces with England's Kneehigh Theatre in this limited engagement, U.S. premiere of Brief Encounter, which is "ingeniously crafted with whimsical humor, dreamy romance, and stunning multimedia effects." The play is centered around a suburban housewife who falls madly in love with a married doctor in a 1938 railway station.

ART: SFMOMA is holding a Memorial Service honoring Bay Area sculptor and conceptual artist David Ireland, who passed away in May. Ireland's highly idiosyncratic body of work focused on the creation and function of art within everyday life. There will be a program in the Wattis Theater at 4 p.m. featuring speakers who were close to Ireland and his work, followed by a gathering in the Schwab Room at 5 p.m.

THEATER: As part of the Fringe Festival, "Sexy Clown" Summer Shapiro and Peter Musante of Blue Man Group present Legs and All, a comically-cringeworthy slapstick performance in which "dinner times turn to drum brigades, and fights turn to tango dancing."

The 18th Annual Fringe Festival, which features a completely unjuried format and gives the artists total creative freedom, starts tonight. Navigating the Fringe Festival's "free form" website is a bit overwhelming, much like trying to choose which performances to watch. One feature that we really like is the Audience Review section, in which users can add their 2-cents on an ongoing basis.

Best Coast open.

COMEDY: Comedian Mary Van Note will have the Dark Room squirming with her quirky and awkward humor tonight and next Saturday. Tonight's special guests are Caitlin Gill, Emily Heller, and Ray Molina.

THEATER: Jarringly different from the The Miracle Worker, this re-telling of deaf-blind Helen Keller has Annie Sullivan speaking only in Japanese throughout the play, which "leads Helen to discover her abilities to communicate reach beyond her immediate surroundings." Helen Keller, the theater's site goes on to say, "explores the challenges of her isolation through the use of language in hope to illuminate our need for personal interaction in a technological non-personal world." (Why do you hate technology so much, artists?) Run until 9/6.

MUSIC: Terrorbird and Smile! present a stellar night of disco pop. Hailing from NYC, octet The Phenomenal Handclap Band will get the dancefloor moving and sweating. Bay Area faves Bart Davenport, Tempo No Tempo, and DJ Neil Martinson will get the party started.

If you're a theater nerd, you might already know the most famous aspect of Samuel Beckett's two-person play Happy Days, which is currently being performed at the California Shakespeare Theater in Orinda. This is the play with the woman buried up to her neck in dirt -- not to be confused with Endgame, which features two legless characters who live in trash cans -- and it's getting a rare and riveting staging here in the East Bay. Part dark-humored feminist allegory, part existentialist experiment, it takes balls to attack this play, both as director and performer.

ART: It's your last chance to view the current exhibitions at SF Camerawork. The Summer Exhibition Cool-Down Party features Ersatz Group Exhibition, Leaving A Mark: Cutter Photozine, and The 2009 James D. Phelan Art Award in Photography. The publication of the Ersatz exhibition catalog will also be announced.

THEATER: Tonight is the first preview night of Cal Shakes' production of Samual Beckett's Happy Days, directed by Jonathan Moscone. Beckett's astounding portrait of a woman buried up to her waist in sand explores the theme that "we are all alone in the face of death, and all alone in the face of life." Ticket availability for tonight's show is limited, so act fast!