Start with the wit of Oscar Wilde, blend in an Austin Powers palette and an effervescent musical score and you get “Being Earnest,” the exuberant new musical making its world premiere at TheatreWorks in Mountain View.
When “The Importance of Being Earnest” premiered in 1895, London’s The Times reported, “The story is almost too preposterous to go without music.”
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The rousing new production of “Big River” at TheatreWorks is a smooth-sailing evening of musical theater and classic American storytelling. The 1985 Tony winner for best musical, adapted from Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” serves up a toe-tapping score and engaging book by the lauded singer-songwriter Roger Miller and librettist William Hauptman.The highlight and the heart of the show is the relationship between Huck and Jim.
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“I have to understand why a genius becomes obsessed with mediocrity!” exclaims New York music scholar Katherine Brandt, herself rather obsessive.
She is the central figure in Moisés Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” now in a West Coast premiere at TheatreWorks. The title refers to Beethoven’s variations on a simple melody composed by his contemporary, the music publisher Diabelli.
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“We got a future,” migrant farmworker George assures his companion, the mentally disabled hulk Lenny, in “Of Mice and Men”: “A couple of acres and some pigs ... a rabbit hutch ...”
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Maybe I would have liked the current revival of the 1991 Tony-winning musical “The Secret Garden” better if the book of the same name, upon which it’s based, hadn’t been one of my childhood favorites. Or maybe I’d have loved the musical — as the opening night audience certainly seemed to — if playwright-lyricist Marsha Norman had managed to turn Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic, published in 1911, into adult fare in a cleaner, leaner way.
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In creating her story of two young women in love, Jane Austen cast such an empathetic and amused eye on the manners and mores of her time — and wrote so gracefully, and with such sly humor and deep understanding of the female heart, that her many novels have endured for two centuries.
Along the way, they’ve been transformed into entertaining plays and musicals as well as films and TV miniseries.
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TheatreWorks founding director Robert Kelley has a theory why Jane Austen’s works remain so popular two centuries after she wrote them. “She was what we might call one of the early feminist writers. It’s fascinating to see what it was like for her,” says Kelley, who directed TheatreWorks’ acclaimed production of Austen’s “Emma” and is now at the helm of the American premiere of the stage version of “Sense and Sensibility” at the Center for the Performing Arts in Mountain View.
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If you haven’t read David Guterson’s award-winning 1994 novel “Snow Falling on Cedars,” you might not realize until fairly far along in Kevin McKeon’s stage adaptation that there’s a main character — Ishmael, a white boy living on an island in Puget Sound in Washington. During the course of the play, onstage in a TheatreWorks production, he grows up and goes off to fight in World War II.
In doing so, he leaves behind his childhood playmate Hatsue.
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