Emily S. MendelTheaterBerkeley,
“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 meth-addicted young parents Carlie and Peter, and Carlie’s “crazy Christian” ...
Karen WeinsteinMusicLos Angeles,
The battle lines are drawn. On the one side there are the opera snobs who label “Carmen” as that “chestnut.” On the other, there are the thousands who fill halls when “Carmen” plays. The beautiful and melodic score, and the dramatic (and not too preposterous) story pulls audiences in. For ...
Mary NguyenMusicLondon,
It has been a quarter of a century since Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass collaborated together and composed "Passages" - a superb fusion of traditional Indian and Western music, separated into six parts. Today, it is Shankar's devoted daughter Anoushka who performs with a sitar. Proudly and skilfully, she ...
Emily S. MendelTheaterBerkeley,
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 that playwright Madeleine George (Precious Little) has to present. And ...
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” ...
