Jaime Robles – Page 4 – Repeat Performances

September 25, 2019

Hats off to A.C.T.’s “Top Girls”

What makes Caryl Churchill’s plays great is that they explain nothing. They present complex and even painful situations as matters of fact to be looked at and examined without the interference of an obvious agenda on the part of the playwright. Interpretation is left to the director, actors and audience. Exemplary of this approach to theater is Top Girls, which opened at A.C.T.’s Geary Theater this past weekend. The play premiered in London in 1982, in the midst of Margaret...

Categories: theater

September 21, 2019

Mark Morris meets Mozart

Mark Morris Dance Group, long loved by audiences in Berkeley, presented the choreographer’s Mozart Dances this past weekend at Cal Performances’ Zellerbach Hall. The company premiered the work at the Lincoln Center in New York City in August 2006, and performances in Berkeley followed soon after. The dance is set to two piano concertos and a sonata for two pianos by Mozart. The formidable Inon Barnatan was the pianist, and the Berkeley Symphony was directed by long-time MMDG...

Categories: dance

September 15, 2019

A warm and colorful “Midsummer Night’s Dream”

Marin Shakespeare Company performed Shakespeare’s delightful comedy Midsummer Night’s Dream this past Sunday. The show is the third and last of their summer festival in what is now their 30th year of producing and performing plays, the majority of which were written by Will Shakespeare. The company is at a turning point made possible by an anonymous donor who offered $2,000,000 as the lead gift in a capital campaign in 2015. Since then the company, under the continuing...

Categories: theater

September 7, 2019

The beauty of “Billy Budd”

Out of the near dark an old man hobbles slowly to the front of the stage. With a light illuminating only his face and chest, creating the image of an unfinished man, a half of a man, he begins his story. He is Captain Edward Fairfax Vere, who commanded the British warship “Indomitable” during the Napoleonic Wars. And he is filled with self-doubt and remorse as he looks back at his failure as a leader of men. Vere will also close Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, because...

Categories: opera

August 10, 2019

West Edge Opera’s “Breaking the Waves”: An interview with Sara LeMesh and Robert Wesley Mason

This past week West Edge Opera opened its West Coast premier of composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek’s opera, Breaking the Waves. The opera premiered at Opera Philadelphia in September 2016. Based on the 1996 film by Lars von Trier, the opera is set in the Scottish highlands and tells the story of Bess McNeill, a young woman from a closed Calvinist community who marries a Scandinavian oil-rigger, Jan Nyman. When he is paralyzed in a work accident, Nyman encourages...

Categories: opera

August 9, 2019

Visions of Gluck in new politics

For some years now West Edge Opera has presented three operas at their summer festival. One of these has been an opera from the baroque or classical periods, which has led to some wonderful musical and theatrical performances, based on wilder contemporary imaginings and re-staging of opera from a very different time and mindset. This year the company’s opera was Gluck’s 1762 Orfeo ed Euridice, updated politically to encompass the vision of director and choreographer KJ Dahlaw....

Categories: opera