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'Into the Woods' at Starlight Theatre
even flowers have their dangers...
The fractured fairy tale “Into the Woods,” with music by Stephen Sondheim and book by James Lapine, begins with a wish. Several wishes, actually. There are a few things one might wish for in any Starlight Theatre production, ...

"The Merry Wives of Windsor" at the Old Globe Theatre
Falstaff Goes Western
Many elements of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” production now in the summer Shakespeare rotation at the Old Globe Theatre are, alone, worth the price of admission. The play itself, one of Shakespeare’s sloppiest and ...

"Romeo and Juliet" at the Old Globe
The Solid Family Model
Order a solid, mid-range, durable, family “Romeo and Juliet” and you’ll get something like Richard Seer’s version, now playing as the second of three summer Shakespeare shows in rotation outdoors at the Old Globe ...

"...Then There Was Another" at the Don Powell Theater, SDSU
The third installment of the Hybrid Authorship Trilogy comes into its own
So often the artistic process is an invisible one. Months or years of thought, experimentation, and revision culminate in a single evening on which to validate or reject all the work that preceded it. So often what seems an instant success is really ...

"All's Well That Ends Well" at the Old Globe Theatre
Bring in the Clowns! And Italy!
Other than the occasional burst of poetry and some swaggering second bananas, there’s just not much to celebrate in “All’s Well That Ends Well.” It’s an extended dirty joke, the one about the bride who ...

San Diego Musical Theatre's "Bye Bye Birdie"
"Hello" to an old favorite, "Bye Bye" ECPAC
One hardly thinks of "Bye Bye Birdie" as an overlooked gem of a show, but that's exactly what comes to mind in San Diego Musical Theatre's current production of the rockin' 1960 musical that gently pushed Broadway into that tumultuous decade. ...

Kenny Burrell Quartet Plays North Park Theatre
Cool Jazz on a Hot night
The concert at the Birch North Park Theatre was advertised as the Kenny Burrell Quartet, but it was more like a jazz summit. Balancing pianist Mike Wofford with guitarist Burrell and backing them with bassist Bob Magnusson and drummer Duncan Moore ...

Odets' "Golden Boy" at New Village Arts
Mad About the Golden Boy
For millennia men have been biffing each other for sport with their bound or gloved fists. The ancient Sumerians, Minoans, Greeks, and Romans socked one another in the heads and torsos during public contests of strength and skill. And out of all that, ...

Mainly Mozart Festival: The Final Concert
I have a dreadful confession to make. I have never much cared for music written for large wind ensembles. That is to say, ensembles composed chiefly of reeds and double-reeds and brass not augmented by strings and percussion. Perhaps I inherited this ...

"The Listener" by Moxie Theatre at the Lyceum Space
The clash in the trash
Ricocheting breathlessly through the juicy halls of pop culture is endless fun because the landscape is always in flux. The rave of the today is the dud of tomorrow and it takes effort to keep up. That’s why attempts to ...