Jaime Robles – Page 14 – Repeat Performances

February 17, 2018

Central Works winds through the maze in “Bamboozled”

Central Works opened its 58th world premiere this past weekend with Bamboozled, a play written by Patricia Milton and developed in the company’s Writers Workshop. The play like so many of Central Works’ creations is political, full of ironic humor and blessed with a twisty-turny roller-coaster plot. The play takes place in a law office in a small town in Tennessee during February 2017. A young African American woman, Abby, has been accused of fraud by one of the local pillars of...

Categories: theater

February 15, 2018

Opera Parallèle’s on-pitch tribute to Bernstein and love

Opera Parallèle celebrated the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth this past weekend in a performance that included two short operas and several dramatized musical pieces woven into a loose narrative, rather like the one-act that was the finale of the evening, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti. Perhaps in honor of their collaboration with SFJAZZ at the Center where the performance was held, the evening began with a jazz-infused selection from West Side Story, blazingly...

Categories: opera

February 11, 2018

Opera San José’s haunting “Dutchman”

The curtain opened on a three-sided set of wood walls that rose from stage floor to flies. Projected on the surface of these walls was a film of stormy sky and sea separated by a line of seemingly enormous craggy cliffs. The deep blue sky was coursed by turbulent clouds; waves rose in turmoil. Agitated movement flowed across the entire stage, only to be replaced by equally striking imagery. Out of a blood-red world the silhouette of a ship appeared. Flames engulfed the stage as the Dutchman...

Categories: opera

February 9, 2018

“Rap on Race” redux: Spectrum Dance Theater takes on James Baldwin and Margaret Mead

In 1971 anthropologist Margaret Mead and writer James Baldwin met to talk about race. Their conversation took place over two and a half days and was released in audio only. Actress and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has used the tapes of this conversation over the past 30-plus years, in the classroom and on stage, its text morphing into various theatrical forms. In a recent version, the choreographer Donald Byrd used Deavere Smith’s version of the text as part of an 85-minute dance–theater...

Categories: dance

February 2, 2018

More marriage and merriment à la Gilbert and Sullivan: The Lamplighters present “The Gondoliers”

Charming, silly and entertaining, The Gondoliers is undeniably Gilbert and Sullivan, but it’s also one of its creators’ sweetest operettas. It only glimpses into the world of topsy-turvy – the nonsensical world in which logic was set against itself to cause sorrow among the young, only to be resolved and lifted into joy with the same backwards logic. Topsy-turvy was the world that earmarked the Victorian sensibility of the author and composer and assured their success and their...

Categories: opera

January 23, 2018

San Francisco Ballet’s reawakening of “The Sleeping Beauty”

San Francisco Ballet opened its season last week with performances of the classical masterpiece of Imperial Russian ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. The company, showcasing many of its young principal dancers during the run, which continues to February 7, showed that this quintessential classical ballet still ignites the imagination, presenting a soul-lifting mix of charm and grandeur. The ballet was choreographed by Marius Petipa to Tchaikovsky’s score in 1890, and SF Ballet’s...

Categories: dance