A Wishful toast to Fisher's Drinking
The force is strong with this one. Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her one-woman stage autobiography, continues its wild ride.The Bay Area saw the show twice at Berkeley Repertory Theatre before it landed on Broadway. The book with the same name was a New York Times bestseller. And now Wishful Drinking is an HBO documentary.The show has its broadcast debut at 9pm Sunday, Dec. 12 and repeats through Dec. 28 (on HBO) and Dec. 29 (on HBO 2).
This Composer really is dead
There’s a moment of absolute magic in the world premiere of Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead now at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.
We’ve just been subjected to a rather dispiriting film (more on that in a minute), a sort of theatrical appetizer, and we’re making the transition into the main course. The curtain on the Roda Theatre rises to reveal an absolutely magnificent set that looks like a life-size Victorian paper theater.
There’s an orchestra full of puppets – each personality-infused face affixed to a representation of an instrument – and Geoff Hoyle (the only human in the show) as the Inspector in a fantastic plaid suit preparing to solve the crime of who murdered the world’s greatest, formerly living composer.
The reveal of the set in all its glory is by far the best part of this strangely moribund evening. The show, including the movie, is just over an hour, and yet it seems much longer.
Tracking big Game: Delving into Afghanistan at Berkeley Rep
Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, gazes over a map of Afghanistan and says to Abdur Rahman, the country's Amir, "Your country is in the wrong place."
That imagined pronouncement could have occurred in 1893, when Ron Hutchinson's play Durand's Line, takes place. Or it could be an echo that reverberates through much of Afghanistan's complex and troubled history – at least the chunks of history we experience in The Great Game: Afghanistan, an extraordinary theater event now in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's Roda Theatre.
A hit for London's Tricycle Theatre, a company known for connecting audiences with plays of political and historical import, The Great Game is now touring the U.S. with a three-part cycle of 12 one-act plays (and assorted interstitial monologues), all about Afghanistan from the 1800s to present day. Tricycle Artistic Director Nicolas Kent felt that all the attention was going Iraq and the war raging there with not enough focus on Afghanistan and the war raging there. So he commissioned a bunch of playwrights to write about the country, and this powerfully involving theatrical marathon is the result.
Berkeley Rep is presenting Part One, 1842-1930, Invasions & Independence on Wednesdays; Part Two, 1979-1996, Communism, the Mujahideen & the Taliban on Thursdays; and Part Three, 1996-2010, Enduring Freedom on Fridays. Then all three parts are presented in marathon viewings on Saturdays and Sundays. For opening day last Friday, we were able to see all three parts. We started at 11:30am and finished shortly after 10:30pm. Box meals are available in the theater lobby so patrons can keep their strength up, and a number of local restaurants offer prix-fixe menus to ensure that patrons enjoy a hearty meal and get back to the theater in time.
This really is a staggering event, and you have to get your head in the right place to enjoy it.
With strings attached, Compulsion compells
It's so incredibly exciting to be enthralled by someone or something. In the case of Rinne Groff's Compulsion at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, it's someone and something.
The world-premiere production (in collaboration with Yale Repertory Theatre, where the play ran earlier this year, and The Public Theater in New York, where the play goes next) is ostensibly a roman a clef about the life of Meyer Levin, the journalist and novelist most famous for the novel Compulsion, his fictionalized spin on the Leopold and Loeb murders. Levin's stand-in here is Sid Silver, also Jewish, also from Chicago, also married to a French woman, also obsessed with Anne Frank and her diary.