Robert Hall

September 11, 2015

ACT opens its season with a sizzling new play

A proud old man stands his ground at ACT ACT’s Geary Street stage bursts with life in the company's 49th season opener, Stephen Adly Guirgis’s vivid and profane Between Riverside and Crazy.  The life the play reveals belongs to New York City cops and criminals, who intersect explosively in a rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive. Inside the apartment’s shabby walls everybody claims to tell it like it is, but...

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Categories: theater

September 5, 2015

Flight attendants party at Aurora Theatre

Flight attendants take off at Aurora Theatre They greet you at the door, they bring you a blanket, they serve you drinks and trays of food, they make sure your seat belt is fastened, and when it’s all over and your’e safely on the ground, they chirp a cheery good-bye.  Likely you’ll never see them again. They’re flight attendants, and you get to meet three of them off duty (boy, are they off...

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July 16, 2015

A Spanish classic at Cal Shakespeare

Cal Shakes mounts a dream of a play   When I was a kid, a bouncy song called “Sh-Boom,” featuring the lyric, “Life is but a dream,” was a big hit.  So was the movie The Bad Seed, about a sneaky monster of a child.  Though I couldn’t have guessed it, I had butted up against plot elements of 17th century Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca’s classic, Life Is a Dream, now strutting its stuff, in a translation by Pulitzer Prize winner...

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Categories: theater