Jaime Robles – Page 2 – Repeat Performances

February 1, 2020

The delightfully daft “Princess Ida”

Founded in 1869 by Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon, Girton College was Britain’s first residential college for women offering a college degree. Its opening was followed two years later by Newnham College, and at the University of Oxford, Somerville College in 1879 and Lady Margaret Hall in 1878. The University of London opened its first women’s college in 1882. Women’s education was on the move in Victorian England. On January 5, 1884, the latest Gilbert and Sullivan comic...

Categories: opera, theater

January 29, 2020

“Wakey Wakey” a bit sleepy sleepy

Up until its last minutes Wakey Wakey is a monologue. A man in a wheelchair sits in the middle of a stage fitted out to look like an institutional setting, could be a school, could be an empty Elks club, could be a hospital. And he talks to us, the audience. Or rather, he meanders and we are his witnesses, his silent conversationalists. It’s understandable why A.C.T. might have been drawn to stage Will Eno’s Wakey Wakey. It’s about a man who is dying and in those...

Categories: theater

January 21, 2020

A miraculous Cinderella

Figures in deep blues and green whirl across the stage to a hectic waltz by Prokofiev. Above them a clutter of candelabras shines down like stars in the night sky, and two figures, a prince in a deep red jacket with military decorations and a young woman in a dress covered in pheasant feathers and wearing a gold mask and gold slippers, appear and disappear among the whirling figures. They lose each other, they find each other. The scene, from San Francisco Ballet’s production of...

Categories: dance, uncategorized

December 7, 2019

Digging into winter: San Francisco Playhouse’s “Groundhog Day”

It’s hard to imagine the darkly comic film with Bill Murray, Groundhog Day, as a musical, even though musicals these days tend often deal with the bleaker side of human nature, at their darkest delving into criminality and murder. The play was chosen, according to San Francisco Playhouse’s Artistic Director Bill English, because the company was seeking “a show that will work well for the holidays.” One that was not A Christmas Carol, the most iconic theatrical piece...

Categories: theater

November 23, 2019

Nothing up our sleeves: difference and illusion at The Marsh

David Hirata begins “The Box Without A Bottom,” his performance monologue currently at The Marsh in Berkeley, with a story about taking his daughter to eat sushi for the first time. During their meal he needs to explain to his daughter that she is half-Japanese. She replies, “You mean I’m half Japanese and half Regular?” It’s a telling moment for Hirata, and one that many people from various ethnic and racial groups feel while living in this hodge-podge of American demographics...

Categories: theater

November 15, 2019

The sweetness of home: San Francisco Opera’s “Hansel and Gretel”

Grimm’s folk tales are indeed grim. Often functioning to terrify children, they frequently pit innocence against malevolence. We don’t seem to be able to free ourselves of them and our childhoods remain full of girls in red hoods chased by wolves and starving children abandoned by their parents in dark woods. For what keeps the stories alive and seductive is that the innocents often defeat the evil forces that threaten them. Hansel and Gretel, the 1893 opera by Engelbert...

Categories: opera