Seducing Amy Glazer (away from the stage)
Theater folk know Amy Glazer as one of the busiest directors in Bay Area theater. But she also has a burgeoning career as a film director, which is no surprise given that she grew up on movie sets.
I interviewed Glazer for a feature in the San Francisco Chronicle pegging to the release of her second full-length feature, Seducing Charlie Barker, which is based on Theresa Rebeck's play The Scene, which Glazer directed at SF Playhouse in 2008. (Read my review of that production here.)
Fuzzy no more: life after Disneyland
Last summer at Berkeley's Impact Theatre, Trevor Allen dusted off Working for the Mouse, his finely tuned one-man show about his years as Pluto, Mr. Smee, the Mad Hatter and others on the pavement at Disneyland.
I reviewed the show in June (read the review) and had a chance to interview Allen about the show as he prepared to re-open it at the EXIT Theatre. Read the feature in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Hair today...
In which I discuss my Broadway debut in Hair and link to my San Francisco Chronicle review of the touring production.Let the sun shine. Let the sun shine. The sunshine in.
Kym Barrett designs a Cirque evolution
You don't go to a Cirque du Soleil show just to see the costumes. Audiences are usually slathering for the death-defying acrobatics and goofy clowns. But what separates a Cirque show from the rest of the circus fray is the spectacle, and that certainly has a lot to do with the costumes.
The latest touring Cirque opus is Totem, another artsy epic under a blue-and-yellow striped tent behind AT&T Park. The theme for this show is evolution, and the costumes are by a charming Australian designer named Kym Barrett. She's best known for her work in movies – perhaps you've seen one of the Matrix movies or Speed Racer? If you haven't caught one of those, you can check out her work in the upcoming reboot of the Spider-man franchise and the film adaptation of the hit novel Cloud Atlas.
Project bridges Spacey and SF
The Bridge Project, that transatlantic experiment in blending American and English actors and designers is slowly wending its way to a close after three seasons. The final lap of the project, a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Old Vic in London and director Sam Mendes' production company, is Shakespeare's Richard III starring The Old Vic's artistic director, a dude named Kevin Spacey.
Neither Spacey nor Mendes made himself available to the press to promote the San Francisco stop on the R3 world tour, so I wrote a feature for the San Francisco Chronicle about the Bridge Project itself.
Bill Cain opens a new book for Bible
Bill Cain's last two Bay Area outings, Equivocation and 9 Circles, both at Marin Theatre Company, were absolutely fantastic. So there's reason to be excited about the world premiere of his latest play, How to Write a New Book for the Bible at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. With great compassion, intelligence and humor, Cain writes about his parents and his older brother in a play that flips back and forth in time as Cain cares for his dying mother.
I talked to Cain about the play for an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. Read the story here.
As usual, there wasn't enough space in the story to include all of Cain's interview, so I'd like to include a few more morsels here.
TheatreWorks designs with Sense and Sensibility
In today's San Francisco Chronicle, I talk with TheatreWorks Artistic Director Robert Kelley, set designer Joe Ragey and costume designer Fumiko Bielefeldt about their work on bringing Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility to the stage.
Where there's a Will...
Recently I had the pleasure of conducting an email interview with playwright Will Eno, whose Lady Grey (in ever lower light) and other plays closes this weekend at Cutting Ball Theater.
Read the interview in the San Francisco Chronicle here.
There was more interview than there was room in the newspaper, so please enjoy the rest of Mr. Eno's responses.
Q: Dogs tend to pop up in your work, or more specifically, the deaths of dogs. Does this mean you’re a dog lover or the opposite?
A: I am solidly and proudly a dog lover. I even sometimes think of this as an enlightened position, a paradoxically humane approach to the world. Other times, though, I worry that I love dogs because I love to imagine a world in which there are only about three total feelings and three total needs, and it never gets more complicated than that. “Yes, I want to go for a walk. Yes, I’m hungry. Yes, thank you, I would like to climb up on your leg. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go around in circles and then fall asleep until I wake up barking and run over to the door.” The great dogs in my life have made me feel like I’m a good and trustworthy person. They allow you to live on or near an essential level that is just fairly basic and stable needs, and once those are taken care of, it’s all cats and shiny hubcaps and tennis balls.
Weight and see: Don’t miss 40 Pounds
They say you should never ask a lady about her weight. Well, Pidge Meade is a lady who freely talks about her weight – in fact she's written an entire solo show about it.
40 Pounds in 12 Weeks: A Love Story, now at The Marsh in San Francisco, is Meade's intimate, not to mention funny, moving and generally marvelous, account of being a formerly fat lady. One of her recurring characters is a carnival barker who keeps directing our attention to the exhibit of the formerly fat lady trying to navigate her way through difficult life situations such as basking in (too much?) attention at 20-year college reunion or going the metaphysical, from-the-inside-out route toward weight loss.
Clybourne Park is amazing. But this is not a review.
Because I interviewed playwright Bruce Norris for the San Francisco Chronicle (read the interview here), I will not be reviewing his Clybourne Park at American Conservatory Theater.
Mr. Norris requests that journalists who interview him not review his work. I'm happy to respect that request, but know that it will be extremely difficult not to tell you how extraordinary this play is or that it's the first absolutely-must-see show of 2011.
An ogre sings: the creation of Shrek
In today's San Francisco Chronicle, I write about how Shrek, the hit series of animated films, became a Broadway musical and how that musical has actually improved – according to the creative team – in its transition to a touring show.Read the story here.There wasn't room in the story for all the fantastic quotes from all the key players involved, so here are, in essence the "DVD extras."