Jaime Robles – Page 6 – Repeat Performances

June 9, 2019

San Francisco Opera’s elegant “Orlando”

Orlando, Handel’s Italian opera for English audiences, is based on an epic poem by the 16th-century poet Ludovico Ariosto. Orlando Furioso, loosely translated as the Madness of Roland, is set in the midst of the Crusades, and its hero is driven mad by his love for a pagan princess. The setting of San Francisco Opera’s production of Orlando is also in the midst of war, but the pastoral setting of the poem, which included a shepherdess, has definitely gone urban. British...

Categories: opera

June 5, 2019

Rampaging rhinos at A.C.T.

It’s not necessary to decode Ionesco’s 1959 play, Rhinoceros, the playwright himself thoroughly explained its meaning. Hearkening back to his youth in Romania, he informed the public via interview of his university life, when one by one his colleagues abandoned their opposition to fascism and became part of the Iron Guard, the ultra nationalist, anti-Semitic paramilitary group founded in 1927 that rose to power in Romania at the beginning of World War II. Ionesco’s meaning is...

Categories: theater

June 1, 2019

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s artistic operas

Left Coast Chamber Ensemble’s Dorothea and Artemisia, featured world premieres of two chamber operas, and although the operas were billed as being each about an extraordinary woman artist, the reach of both operas was far larger, touching upon the structure of our lives as we live them today. From the Field, by composer Christopher Stark with libretto by Megan Stark, is listed in the program as a micro-opera of only 25 minutes. Using the work of Depression-era...

Categories: opera

May 6, 2019

Victorian Ladies detected at Central Works

With a painting of Diana the huntress over the mantel that houses their two separate collections of books and a porcelain statue of a long-haired hound, the sisters Loveday and Valeria live a genteel and irritable life together as Victorian ladies. Both have wandered slightly (and not so slightly) off the path of respectability, and they are about turn that wandering into a gallop. When the bodies of young actresses begin to turn up in the streets surrounding their lodging house for young...

Categories: theater

April 24, 2019

A deft and charming “Vanity Fair”

As the top-hatted Manager assures us from the stage setting of Vanity Fair: there are no morals here. But that’s a good thing, for as most of us have discovered, morals are not a lot of fun. And if there is one thing the A.C.T. production of Thackeray’s classic satire is, it’s fun. Delightfully, wackily, preposterously fun. Much more so than the darker, more biting original. The humor starts with the playwright’s witty handling of the book. The original was set in...

Categories: theater

March 22, 2019

Quote Unquote Collective’s “Mouthpiece”

This past weekend, Cal Performances presented Mouthpiece, a 65-minute performance piece developed by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava of the Toronto–based theater group Quote Unquote Collective. Mouthpiece won the Stage Award for Performance at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2017, and the Berkeley performance was the last stage presentation of the piece, which took three years to develop. Mouthpiece has gone on to other manifestations, as a book by Canadian...

Categories: theater