Jaime Robles – Page 9 – Repeat Performances

November 30, 2018

Finding true love at “Beach Blanket Babylon”

From the instant the band, dressed in all-black Blues Brothers shirts and fedoras, takes their place next to the stage at the Club Fugazi the long-lived and long-loved Beach Blanket Babylon is in full swing. The holiday show currently on-stage decks its halls with madcap satire and a chorus line of dancing Christmas trees adding merriment to anyone’s winter season. Though things are looking brighter, this year we need lots of cheer. The comic review, which began its bravura run in...

Categories: theater

November 17, 2018

“It’s a Wonderful Life” turns operatic

It’s oddly ironic that Frank Capra’s 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life” was released by his production company Liberty Films. For the film and the opera, revised from its 2016 premier, both look at freedom as seen by an American Everyman who wants to rid himself of the shackles of small-town living and capitalist venality, and live a larger, grander life. A life he has freely constructed out of his imagination and idealism. The opera version that opened this Saturday at San...

Categories: opera

November 15, 2018

High voltage Cirque du Soleil

The circus is in town! Hurrah! Last week the Cirque du Soleil set up its big top tent for its latest gloriously glitzy, jaw-dropping production, Volta. Presenting, as always, a ferociously paced but immensely enjoyable show, the company has changed since its first shuddery start in Canada in 1984. I saw the original US 1987 show at the Los Angeles Art Festival, the run that would vault the company into international success, and although the amount of shiny costumes has multiplied...

Categories: dance, theater

October 27, 2018

Facing the music of our lives

The Center Repertory Company presents Mark St. Germain’s comedy, Dancing Lessons, through November 17 at the Margaret Lesher Theater in Walnut Creek’s Lesher Center for the Arts. The play premiered in Massachusetts in 2014. The 90-minute romantic comedy tells the story of two people who are intensely challenged by their lives and how they struggle to overcome the isolation of those lives by interacting with each other. Senga (Sharon Rietkerk) is a dancer who has had an accident,...

Categories: theater

October 19, 2018

A crisp and fresh “Women Laughing Alone with Salad”

Three women – one thin, one voluptuous, one middle-aged – are sitting on a park bench, eating enormous bowls of salad. Soon they are taken with giggles, then howls of laughter. Hmmm. How fun is it to eat salad? Shotgun Players’ production of Women Laughing Alone with Salad zeros in on this question. And the answers are engaging, hilarious and very familiar. [caption id="attachment_2089" align="aligncenter" width="720"]...

Categories: theater

October 16, 2018

Love from the hinterlands: San Francisco Opera’s “Arabella”

Arabella, lovely Arabella, positioned to buy her family out of debt through marrying off her beauty to the highest bidder, but searching wistfully for Mr. Right. Can the two inharmonious approaches to love resolve into one happy ending? In Richard Strauss’ opera they do indeed. And in the San Francisco Opera production that opened on Tuesday they resolve, like Tobias Hoheisel’s production design, from black and white into varieties of gray. Nonetheless suggesting, somehow, that an...

Categories: opera