Posts by Martin Jones Westlin
The Play’s the Thing in CCdd’s Clever ‘Best Goodbye’
Hip-hop fare has its blatant poetic streak, which in its own rite makes it a storyteller’s genre. San Diego-based playwright Gill Sotu understands this in no uncertain terms — his ‘The Best Goodbye’ is loaded with anecdotes big and small, and a savvy cast from Circle Circle dot dot takes the show from there.
Read MoreHershey Bars: Felder Shines in Mildly One-Sided ‘Maestro’
We haven’t seen the likes of Leonard Bernstein’s modern impact on music before him or since — Lenny could do it all, and he had no qualms about heralding music’s place in the human experience. ‘Maestro,’ currently on tap at San Diego Repertory Theatre, is local favorite Hershey Felder’s nod to the big man — even amid its topheavy qualities, it’s certainly a piece for the mind and heart.
Read MoreMusical Genius All in the Family in Fair ‘The Other Mozart’
The evidence is sketchy, but it looks like two of the world’s greatest composers may have met in one of Vienna’s greatest artistic mind-melds. The year was 1787, and a star-struck Ludwig van Beethoven was quaking in his boots; his idol Johann Chrysostomus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had kindly requested an impromptu mini-concert, exchanging a lesson…
Read MoreLanguage, Portraiture Don’t Always Match in NCR’s Decent ‘Hedda Gabler’
Amid her sham marriage and her obsession with what’s not hers, Hedda Gabler Tesman is an Everyman for the world’s pathologically unfulfilled. Henrik Ibsen’s iconic character gets an airing in North Coast Repertory Theatre’s ‘ Hedda Gabler’ — but a new translation seeks to redefine Hedda’s periphery rather than explore her depths.
Read MoreUnrequited Love Smarts In Cygnet’s Good ‘Stupid F**king Bird’
Love and art basically suck, at least when our sensibilities toward each are locked in mortal competition. Anton Chekhov said as much when he wrote ‘The Seagull’ in 1898 — and today, Cygnet Theatre Company is mounting a good treatise to the same effect.
Read MoreBloody past is prologue in MOXIE Theatre’s quite moving ‘Kibeho’
In 1994 and ’95, genocide claimed at least 800,000 lives in the African nation of Rwanda, and the travesty didn’t materialize without warning. The town of Kibehoe was the site of a Marian apparition to that bloody effect — and MOXIE Theatre has staged a good and relevant entry meant to awaken our sensibilities.
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