Why the circus is fascinating remains a grand riddle. The emotions elicited by the art form are often so wild and contradictory that all you want is to harmonize them and find your way back to the normal, everyday world.
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Only the cruelest of Gods would have bothered to create the Russian dancer Vaslav Nijinsky (1889-1950). To fashion a mind and body that approached the perfection of music and then to let it shatter and decay into madness, and all of it just before the age of film, is the work of a punk and a sadist.
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The artist biography, whether on stage, film, or the written page, is a precarious and dangerous form. It can lead even the best storytellers into a plodding parade of "this happened, and then that happened, and, oh, this happened again."
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If you’ve ever wondered whether a stage production could be strangely incompetent and yet somehow deliver a low-key evening of interest, then you might want to go to Performers Under Stress’ production of Bryn Magnus’ Black River Falls
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As Shotgun's production of Who's Afraid unfurls its way to Albee’s haunting end, the production becomes so simple and alive that it hardly feels as if the brilliant cast is acting at all.
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The Thrillpeddlers like San Francisco are high on sensation and low on feeling and so in that sense they're a perfect expression of each other's worst traits.
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In a normal year, Shotgun Players’ 2016 season would be a fantastic memory: five great productions, three of them -- Hamlet, The Village Bike, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -- sharp takes on superb, daring plays. But starting Nov. 25, Shotgun reprises these productions in true repertory fashion for the next two months. Go.
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The Berkeley Rep's It Can't Happen Here is self-congratulatory mush. For all the dangers that Trump poses, the company's anemic response feels equally dangerous and just as much a fantasy.
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Korean-American playwright and provocateur Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment begins with a minstrel routine and ends with a drawing room comedy, which is a rather succinct history of African-American life in America.
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The Eye of Compassion begins on the ground floor, descends to the basement, and ends up floating in the sky. Like The Divine Comedy, paradise is a rueful end.
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