Flying high in Aurora's Mud Blue Sky
There's easy comedy and titillation to be had in choosing to explore the lives of flight attendants. You could blithely whip up a story detailing the lives we imagine those high-fliers live, with their easy access to great cities, hot coworkers and the occasional randy passenger. That story might be fun, but in truth, the days of "coffee, tea or me" are long past, and flying is a grind for everyone, from passengers to crew, and that may actually be the more interesting story.
Marisa Wegrzyn's Mud Blue Sky, now in an extended run through Oct. 3 at Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company, tries to have it both ways.
TheatreWorks delights with devilish Angels
Boredom, desire and champagne make for a potent cocktail in Noël Coward's 1925 comedy Fallen Angels, now receiving a lively production from TheatreWorks at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Director Robert Kelley delivers an elegant outing for this zesty comedy that keeps its focus on two live wire ladies – Jane and Julia, best friends since grammar school.
Magic sends tingles through Chafee’s Body
"Once you start to ask," Eleanor says, "there are more questions than answers." Not a surprising statement in a play whose title, Why We Have a Body promises an answer to an implied question. And as Eleanor warns us, once those questions start forming, the answers, they keep multiplying.
Claire Chafee's wonderfully enigmatic play is back at the Magic Theatre to open its 45th anniversary season with a look backward before heading into a season of newer plays. Body is being called a "legacy revival" because it was a huge hit for the Magic in 1993, running for six months and winning a passel of awards. What a welcome return it is.
In the nearly two decades since the play's premiere, it has lost nothing in its sense of humor, sense of mystery and sense of, well, sensuality.
Chafee's is an intellectual world – people living in their heads, in their pasts (the phrase "when I was a child" crops up a lot), in a perpetual state of perplexity – but that world is sliced through by a sharp comedy derived from family fractures and psychological scars.
Nostalgic for The Homecoming at a different home
The absolute power of live theater, when it's done superbly well, is undeniable. The connection the playwright, the director, the actors and designers forge with the audience – and vice-versa – can be incredibly powerful.
That's a wonderful thing and leave a lasting impression. Sometimes, perhaps, too lasting.
Last week I saw Carey Perloff's production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming for American Conservatory Theater. It's a bizarre, tormentingly fascinating play by a master playwright at the height of his game-playing dramatic powers. And though the production is fine, all I could think about was the Aurora Theatre Company production staged by Tom Ross at the Berkeley City Club in April of 2000.
Taking Steps toward a lively evening
A hit on London’s West End in 2006, The 39 Steps became Broadway’s longest-running comedy two years later. The touring production played San Francisco’s Curran Theatre in December of 2009, and now Mountain View’s TheatreWorks has cast it with a quartet of local favorites.
Under the direction of Artistic Director Robert Kelley, it’s hard to imagine a more enjoyable evening of mystery mayhem and slapstick espionage. Kelley has cast an irresistible quartet of actors to create the whirlwind, and the result is two hours of constant laughs.
Mark Anderson Phillips is Richard Hannay, a Canadian visiting London. Bored, he craves something mindless and trivial, so he goes to the theater. Naturally. There he meets a classic femme fatale, a German named Annabella Schmidt played by Rebecca Dines with an accent think as strudel.