Emily S. MendelTheaterCA,
It’s three-for-three — all Cal Shakes’ plays have been winners so far this summer under the new artistic direction of Eric Ting. And the brilliant “Black Odyssey” is the best of the season to date. An ingenious production in poetry and prose, filled with humor, history, myth, music, magic ...
Toba SingerFilm
“Whose Streets?” by Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis, is a documentary film about the aftermath of the August 2014 gunning down of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black youth, by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson Missouri. The co-directors decided that the best way to gain the community’s trust in ...
Josh BaxtTheaterSan Diego,
Hamlet is so iconic it’s easy to forget how iconic it is. You can barely get through a scene without hearing a well-worn line, and feeling that renewed sense of discovery, or hearing the title of a book you read in college. The play is like Cliffs notes for Western ...
Mary NguyenMusicLondon,
For Monday night, this was a special occasion on many accounts for the BBC Proms. It was the debut for award-winning French early music ensemble Pygmalion and their artistic director Raphaël Pichon. The 32-year-old violinist, countertenor and conductor had dreamed of developing a ensemble - now called Pygmalion - ever ...
Karen WeinsteinTheaterLos Angeles,
If “The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time” were not such terrific theater it would be worth going to see in order to understand what the world looks like through the eyes of an adolescent with Asperger’s, the high functioning end of the Autism spectrum. But forget about ...
David E. MorenoDanceSan Francisco,
The effort of lifting
The effort of missing
The effort of surrender
The effort of not knowing
The effort of listening
The effort of pleasure
The effort of taking care
As part of the 37th season of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, “A Study of Effort” ...
Lynne FriedmannTheaterSan Diego,
After centuries of ballads, poems and other folklore culminating in dozens of movie treatments does the world need another recounting of the Robin Hood legend? The answer is a resounding “yes,” when it’s the imaginative and rollicking “Ken Ludwig’s Robin Hood!” receiving its world premiere at The ...
Michael Wade SimpsonDanceColorado,
Misty Copeland, Herman Cornejo, Tiler Peck, James Whiteside, Isabella Boylston. Jared Angle, Carla Korbes, Lauren Lovette, Marcelo Gomes. The list of ballet dancers appearing on Friday, August 4 at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater for the Vail Dance Festival was like a roll call ...
Toba SingerDanceSan Francisco,
Is classical ballet dead? A good way to test this patient’s viability is to stage Helgi Tomasson’s “Haffner Symphony” in an outdoor setting, where living things abound in the lush splendor of orange poppy-fringed trees and meadows. See how it pales or thrives compared to the majesty of a summer’s ...
Mary NguyenMusicLondon,
As a BBC Proms regular, Nicola Benedetti had the Royal Albert Hall’s attention all to herself when she performed to a packed auditorium on Tuesday night’s Proms 6. It was her time to shine with Shostakovich’s No. 1 Violin Concerto, which she recently recorded on disc, with works by Glazunov, ...
