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,
Those who think that the primary purpose of theatre is to provide a light and entertaining evening out should be aware that playwright Sarah Kane’s one-act drama, “Blasted” is anything but that. Rather, it is an intense, painful experience, full ...
TheaterSan Francisco,
ACT’s new production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is a long evening, with moments of poetry and power interlaced with periods of static and sluggishness. John Douglas Thompson is often mesmerizing as the Danish Prince Hamlet, and he is supported ...
TheaterBerkeley,
The story of The Temptations, the greatest rhythm and blues group of all time, bursts forth at Berkeley Rep in an explosion of energy and élan. Multi-talented artistic actors with soulful voices and limber legs capture the stage, backed by ...
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,
“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 ...
