In playwright-actor Ngozi Anyanwu’s engrossing and endearing “The Monsters,” we meet half-siblings Big and Lil. In the few years they…
Emily S. Mendel
Emily S. Mendel, a writer, and photographer, has been a regular contributor to culturevulture.net since 2006, where she concentrates her reviews on San Francisco theater and art. As a native New Yorker (although now a long-time San Francisco Bay Area resident), Emily grew up loving and studying theater, from Off to On Broadway, as her multi-volume Playbill collection attests. Ending her 30-year law practice has given Ms. Mendel the time to indulge in her love of travel and the arts.
It’s difficult to imagine that Claude Monet, the world-famous founder of the Impressionism painting movement, ever had a crisis of…
With acute honesty, shrewd intelligence, soft humor, and more than a bit of poignancy, lawyer and retired judge Amy Oppenheimer…
“After Happy,” Central Works’ 79th premiere, is a delightful blend of broad comedy with a message about the climate crisis….
No drama could meet the moment more than this transcendent, heart-wrenching 1947 Tony Award-winning play about two business partners and…
When “M. Butterfly” opened on Broadway in 1988, it was the talk of the town for its avant-garde exploration of…
The phrase “tour de force” is overused, but it is an apt description of Jacob Ming-Trent’s performance in “How Shakespeare…
“Mother of Exiles,” developed in The Ground Floor: Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work, is…
“The Hills of California” is a poignant tale of a mother’s ambition that irrevocably altered the lives of her four…
Playwright Maury Zeff makes high school seem a lot more exciting than I remember it all those years ago. Yes,…
“Manet & Morisot” is the first major exhibition dedicated to the artistic and personal connection between two superb 19th-century French…
Usually, I think plays are too long, because some playwrights erroneously think audiences won’t fully understand their creations without repetition….
My interest in seeing Berkeley Rep’s new production of Jake Brasch’s semi-autobiographical play “The Reservoir” heightened after I read several…