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A Multicultural, Multilingual Feat The South Asian production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that is currently enjoying a run at the Curran Theatre seethes with the mischief and irrepressible sensuality that the Bard perhaps originally intended. This gorgeously hybridized, ingeniously rendered production is Shakespeare as you’ve never seen him before -- unloosed of the priggish, perfectly enunciated Queen’s English that tends to preclude any iota of visceral beauty and theatrical velocity. |
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A Mammoth Achievement The Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s masterful revision of the Mozart opera “The Marriage of Figaro” is less classical redux and more the sort of performance that brings a much-needed draught of fresh air to fustian art forms that have little or nothing to do with our lives. Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s “Figaro” throbs with the vigor and beauty of its operatic antecedent, but the company, who brought down the house two years ago with their traveling masterpiece “The Miser,” adds so many subtle embellishments (all without mangling the epic gorgeousness of Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte’s beloved libretto) that the show transcends its formula quite effo |
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Leave Before Last Call Let’s face it—the one-person show is typically the refuge of the very interesting or the very narcissistic. And when the person in question happens to be a prime specimen of cinematic and cultural arcana, the scales are almost always tipped in favor of vainglorious tell-alls. “Wishful Drinking” (which might have been more appropriately titled “Carrie Fisher Spills the Beans about Her Life, Willy-Nilly”) is one such example. |
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Verbatim Theater James Baldwin believed fervently in the salvific power of literature -- and in the power of a writer to affect change. “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” There were limitations to that power, he believed, but had no other course than to address whatever corrupted principalities permeated the day. |
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Get Into the Holiday Spirit ‘Tis the season for holiday fare, and would Christmas really be complete without paying homage to the god of the dancing nutcracker? The San Francisco Ballet version of "The Nutcracker" is particularly special, since the War Memorial Opera House was the first American venue in which the beloved piece was performed, back in 1944. And to this day, both venue and performance still dazzle. |
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