There’s an old saying that you can’t choose your family. It’s true, to some extent, but the relationships in "Water by the Spoonful" show it can be a lot more complicated. Set in Philadelphia, and pretty much everywhere else, the Pulitzer-winning play tracks two parallel, and ultimately intersecting, threads. ... Paul Robeson sang the soundtrack of my childhood. I wore out two copies of his 78-rpm album, "Ballad for Americans," yet continued to play it, scratches and all. When I was about 8 years old I met him after a concert and watched my hand disappear into the largest hand ... Lovers and losers; speaking and signing; silence and sound; but, above all, family. It’s all interwoven in the intricate pattern of Nina Raine's “Tribes,” one of the best shows to come down the pike in a long, long time. As directed at Berkeley Rep by Jonathan Moscone, it has the ... Ruth Draper is not a household word for you? Well, you are forgiven. She was born in 1884 and performed monologues through the early 1950s. The grayest of the gray-haired in the audience may recall a moment or two of her performances. The rest of us will have to rely ... The musicians of the Curtis Symphony Orchestracapped off their current performance season in Verizon Hall April 13, with a concert dedicated to Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest, whose visionary philanthropy not only extends to the physical resources at the Curtis Institute, but also invests, vitally, in the conservatoire’s student financial needs. ... New on the map in Philly is LA dance troupe Bodytraffic, winning over Dance Celebration audiences with a wide sampling of styles. Artistic directors Lillian Rose Barbieto and Tina Frankelman Berkett (who also danced in the program) chose stylistically disparate works by hot-list choreographers Kyle Abraham, ... How does one mark a particular passage of time, with some anniversaries being more significant than others? For Margaret Jenkins this meant looking back over 75 productions, early studio performances, site-specific works, and international collaborations. At age 71, she has seen many company members and collaborators come and go, along ... Those who remember the V&A’s 2007 exhibition “The Golden Age of Couture” will find this latest kicks off in the same place, chronologically (and, sadly, in the same inadequate exhibition space as well) — just geographically, a little farther south. Whereas “The Golden Age of Couture” covered London and Paris, ... The old adage — “never tell your best friend anything you wouldn’t want your worst enemy to know” — is the armature of Noel Coward’s “A Song At Twilight,” one of the last plays he wrote (1966) before his death in 1973. What Sir Hugo Latymer (Bruce Davison), a ... The Aspen Santa Fe ballet is such a small company, and there has been so much turn-over lately (Craig Black, Sadie Brown, Paul Busch and Peter Franc are all relative newbies, replacing long-time members Sam Chittendon, Katie Dehler and founding member Seth Del Grasso) that part of the interest in ...
