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.”
Read More
“I’m just a man,” sighs Martin Luther King Jr. several times in Katori Hall’s two-character, 2010 Olivier Award-winning one-act, “The Mountaintop,” a regional premiere now at TheatreWorks.
Indeed he is in this altogether funny, thought-provoking and poignant play. Depicted with convincing charm and inner turmoil by Adrian Roberts, he cusses, apparently cheats on his wife, smokes, and has stinky feet and a hole in his sock.
Read More
Toward the end of the second act of Matthew Lopez’s family-drama-with-dance, “Somewhere” — receiving a regional premiere at TheatreWorks — things suddenly get very real.
Alejandro (Michael Rosen), hardworking eldest son and head of his close-knit Puerto Rican family by default (Pops is an absentee father), has a meltdown and confesses long-held secrets. Soon after, things draw to a bittersweet finale.
If only the entire play were that emotionally engaging. But it’s not.
Read More
In “Somewhere,” making its regional premiere at TheatreWorks, some talented Puerto Rican children want to try out for “West Side Story,” but they’re hampered, because they are losing their family’s home.
In 1959 — when ground broke to begin building New York’s Lincoln Center — 7,000 families, many Puerto Rican, were displaced. The little-known issue provides the crux of the plot of the dance-filled play by Matthew Lopez, which begins previews Wednesday in Mountain View.
Read More
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.
Read More
It’s been a long round-trip from the Bay Area to Broadway and back for James Monroe Iglehart. The Hayward native opens this Saturday in the musical “Big River” for TheatreWorks, and the homecoming is manifold.
It’s his fourth turn as Jim, a slave in search of his freedom who journeys down the river in the Tony-winning musical.
Read More
“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.
Read More
Don’t be fooled by the deceptively simple opening of playwright Laura Schellhardt’s father-daughter drama, now onstage in a TheatreWorks premiere. Pops (the always engaging Dan Hiatt) is an electronics salesman who moonlights as a singer-pianist in a bar; in his spare time he’s composing a medley tribute to Charlie Chaplin.
Read More
“Write what you know” is the helpful admonishment often given to creative scribes. For Valerie Vigoda, Brendan Milburn and Gene Lewin — known collectively as the band GrooveLily — writing about the experiences of a music group gigging the country in a beat-up RV was right up their wheelhouse.
Read More
“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 ...”
Read More
URL: http://www.sfexaminer.com/topics/theatreworks?quicktabs_1=0
