Emily S. Mendel, a writer and photographer, has been a regular contributor to culturevulture.net since 2006, where she reviews theater, art, film, television and destinations. Ending her 30-year law practice has given Ms. Mendel the time to indulge in her love of travel and the arts, and to serve as the theater reviewer for berkeleyside.com.
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Writes in: Art & Architecture, Dance, Destinations, Etc, Features, Film, Television, and Theater.
TheaterBerkeley,
“Luna Gale,” the sun around whom all the characters in Rebecca Gilman’s impressive Bay Area premiere play rotates, is the only one we never see. That’s because “Luna Gale” is an infant, the focus of a custody battle between her ...
TheaterBerkeley,
There’s a lot going on in the two-act, three-person production of “The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence” — multiple characters, multiple themes, multiple time periods — so it pays to concentrate in order to absorb all the stimulating ideas ...
TheaterCA,
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 ...
Art & ArchitectureSan Francisco,
In the first scholarly museum exhibit to use hats and the millinery trade as a metaphor for the progression of art and women during the height of the Impressionist era, (from start of the Third French Republic until the outbreak ...
TheaterCA,
Written in 1944, “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), still wields the power to convey truth about the way in which love and need can help and hurt the American family. Standout performances by Karen Aldridge and Sean San ...
TheaterBerkeley,
From the opening minutes of “An Octoroon” when BJJ, the stand-in for author, MacArthur Fellow Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, appears on a blank stage in his underwear and announces that he is a black playwright, you know that you ...
TheaterBerkeley,
Four women wait in a luxurious yet austere room in an unnamed eastern European city waiting for an important man who may never arrive. This is the premise of “Splendour” by U.K.’s Abi Morgan (screenwriter of “Suffragette” and “The ...
TheaterBerkeley,
Kimber Lee’s powerful and profound one-act drama, “brownsville song (b-side for tray)” takes an all too familiar headline of a young black man gunned down in his Brownsville, Brooklyn neighborhood and develops it into a relatable personal tragedy that left ...
Art & ArchitectureBerkeley,
An internationally known and respected artist during his lifetime, but somewhat overlooked and underestimated since his death, Charles Houghton Howard (1899-1978) is rightly celebrated in the first museum survey of his artistic work in over 70 years, entitled “Charles Howard: ...
Art & ArchitectureSan Francisco,
From only 45 remarkable paintings in this astounding exhibition of the important Norwegian Modernist artist Edvard Munch (1863 –1944), one can appreciate his robust 60 years as a working artist. Throughout his career, which spanned from ...
