108 stories by "Harvey Perr"
AN EPIC JOURNEY TO HEAVEN AND HELL It is 1899 in Vienna, Christmas Eve to be exact, and two families, elegant and refined, are gathered together in what might be called joyous solemnity to c…
ONE OF THE MOST INVENTIVE NEW PLAYS OF THE DECADE I've been singing the praises of Lucas Hnath's Dana H. ever since I first saw it three years ago in Los Angeles. Time has not altered my fee…
WILL WE COME THROUGH THIS TOGETHER? Dave Malloy, the genius (and I don't use that word loosely) who wrote the music, lyrics, book and vocal arrangements for his chamber musical Octet, which …
CULTURAL ICON FRAN LEBOWITZ RETURNS TO BERKELEY REP Berkeley Repertory Theatre is proud to announce a special presentation of Fran Lebowitz in Conversation. Following her bingeworthy hit …
DEAR SAN FRANCISCO: A HIGH-FLYING LOVE STORYWELCOMES NEW COMPANY MEMBERS New year, new company members! Starting today, Dear San Francisco: A High-Flying Love Story"the intimate and immer…
CHRISTMAS AT PEM-BAH-LEY Let me start off by saying that I belong to that camp that would like to see a moratorium on all things Jane Austen and an edict to return to her novels would be the…
A SOLITUDE OF ICICLES Where to begin. Wintertime, which brings live theater back to Berkeley Rep, was written by Charles Mee, who has a devoted following among the theatrical cognoscenti, du…
MY FAILED LADY Let's make one thing clear. When a national touring company of a Broadway success comes to your city, proclaiming it is a duplicate of the original production, what is meant b…
A LITTLE LITE MUSIC Any theater company that decides to produce the entire body of work created by a single artist, like, say, aiming to produce every play Shakespeare ever wrote, deserves a…
Indra's Net Conceived, Directed, and Composed by Meredith Monk Meredith Monk's newest interdisciplinary, evening-length music theater piece is an experiential performance work affirming the …
THE RETURN OF THE SHOTGUN PLAYERS It is always a pleasure to come across a playwright with a love for (and a gift for) language and, better, an appreciation for the comic possibilities of wo…
A HOME RUN What do you think of when you think of home? Is it the place where you were born? Is it where you are living now? Is it where you followed your growth by measuring yourself agains…
GLORY GLORY GLORIA I don't know if Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has ever worked in a Manhattan publishing house but he sure knows his way about the workplace. In Gloria, he paints an extraordinary…
REBIRTH Which walls are worse? Those that keep people out or those that keep people in? Playwright Rogelio Martinez seemed to have this question in mind when he wrote Born in East Berlin, wh…
GREAT F. SCOTT! If you love literature, have fond memories of being read to or of reading to others, and feel, as so many do, that F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is in the Pantheon o…
JUMP FOR JITNEY It is an incontestable fact that every play August Wilson wrote justifies being looked at again and again. It has been fascinating to see how the moral, political and emotion…
A PASSIONATE PASSION Stephen Sondheim's Passion is less a work of art than it is an art piece and the Custom Made Theatre Co., in its lovely and elegant chamber version, treats it as such. I…
GO TELL MAMA: CABARET'S A HIT Cabaret was and remains one of the boldest and most innovative experiments in the history of musical theater, a ravishing work that has neither lost its power n…
EVEN WHEN HAIRSPRAY CAN'T HOLD UP… THE EXPERIENCE CAN There are some shows that are beyond criticism or, rather, shows that render criticism totally unnecessary, and the Bay Area Musicals …
I WANNA SEE THE PRODUCERS Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The Celebration production of The Producers is as far away from the Borscht Belt as a New York musical comedy " whose c…
GREEK TRAGEDY IN THE 'HOOD Having read Luis Alfaro's Oedipus El Rey, one can see that is a true original, that it possesses power, anger, frustration, political and social outrage, that Alfa…
A ROLLER COASTER RIDE TO THE HEART OF DARKNESS I will always love good theater but, even so, every so often there comes along a play that actually restores one's faith in the possibilities o…
ACTOR DOUGLAS NOLAN: TOTALLY HUMAN AND TOTALLY ABSURD If you've ever seen a production of Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano that had you in stitches from practically the very first moment ri…
I ALWAYS LIKE TO BE KISSED WHEN I'M BEING… Inspired lunacy? Or strained silliness? Irreverent? Or just plain vulgar? A broad range of Latin musical genres? Or music that's just plain deriv…
WHAT AN ABSURD WORLD The first scene in the A.C.T. revival of Eugene Ionesco's absurdist masterpiece Rhinoceros, directed by Frank Galati with razor-sharp clarity and breakneck swiftness as …
