Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ san pedro playhouse ’

San Antonio psychologist and playwright Tova Rubin presents her newest musical In Their Shoes. This fun fable focuses on a young perfectionist, aptly named Goody 2Shoes, whose life is changed for the better when she meets a traveling shoe salesman named Soulman. By giving her the power to walk in the shoes of others,...
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When David Sedaris first read from his SantaLand Diaries on NPR’s Morning Edition in 1992, it quickly became one of the program’s most popular stories of all time. Dark and wickedly funny, the essay compiles slightly embellished stories from the two seasons Sedaris worked at Macy’s in Herald Square. Donning green velvet knickers and...
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  Well, I’m afraid I’ve been AWOL in the Bay Area while the spectacle of “Vibrator-gate” continues to unfold at the Playhouse (see my initial review of Sarah Ruhl’s “The Vibrator Play” here, the Playhouse President’s subsequent interview here and a fascinating piece by Jade Esteban Estrada for Plaza de Armas here). The good...
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Holy shit.  In December and January, I wrote two columns critical of the San Pedro Playhouse’s lackluster programming, which tends towards warhorses of the “family-friendly” musical theater canon. Last week, newly-appointed President Asia Ciaravino announced that they were scrapping three previously announced productions for next year—“older” musicals like South Pacific and Will Rogers Follies—and...
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So I headed up to Austin to catch Annie Baker’s The Aliens at the Hyde Park Theater, a trip that surprised even me. From the reviews, I figured it’d be the sort of play I normally loathe: heavy on the talk, light on the dramatic action. And indeed, The Aliens turned out to be...
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Compared to his Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County, Tracy Lett’s Superior Donuts is an inferior play. That’s not to say that’s a bad play, but that you have to dial down expectations: it’s exactly the sort of thing that an artist writes after winning every theater award on the planet. In form, Superior Donuts...
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So I’ve been asked by two different parties for my thoughts concerning the ATAC Globe Awards’ list of potential winners for excellence in theater. (The awards ceremony is this Sunday.) The requests startled me. In the past, the only reason I’ve ever had any thoughts concerning potential winners was because of egregious critical lapses...
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