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.
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 ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
A cross between a musical profile and a rock and roll show, Randy Johnson’s “A Night with Janis Joplin” is undoubtedly entertaining. The best aspect of the evening is Kacee Clanton, who does a fabulous Janis. She has the deep ...
TheaterBerkeley,
From Mira Nair’s Golden Globe-nominated 2001 movie comes her world premiere musical version of “Monsoon Wedding,’ a big-hearted earnest extravaganza of a four-day Punjabi Indian wedding, with all the emotion, color and drama that goes with it. Just as “Fiddler ...
