Recent Articles
Culture,
Stage
"Striking 12 is a cross between a GrooveLily concert and a holiday fairy tale," explains Brendan Milburn, keyboardist and one-third of GrooveLily, the New York alternapop trio that wants to make a yearly tradition of settling in Palo Alto (or…
by Michael Scott Moore
January 5, 2005
Tags: Stage, Stage, GrooveLily, Brendan Milburn, Valerie Vigoda, Hans Christian Andersen
News,
Postscript
"Reviving Market" has been a San Francisco opium dream for as long as the city's main street has felt sullen with strip joints and shuttered storefronts, which is to say for most of its life since World War II, and…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 29, 2004
Tags: Postscript, Columns, Bill Schwartz, San Francisco, Berkeley, Gavin Newsom
Culture,
Stage
Stage critics are notorious louts. We say rude things; we don't dress up for opening night. Most of us make embarrassing dinner guests. But Alexander Woollcott -- the fat snob who covered theater for the New York World in the…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 29, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, P.A. Cooley, Alexander Woollcott, John Fisher, Beverly Carlton
Culture,
Stage
Controversy is so rare on Broadway that some theatergoers forget that their overpriced tickets don't always entitle them to comfortable seats. Rock musicals, anniversary revivals, extended pee jokes, outrages by John Waters, and other faux controversies have steeled audiences against…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 22, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Richard Greenberg, Tony Kushner, Joe Mantello, Harlon George
Culture,
Stage
The happiest game Tom Stoppard has played onstage may be Travesties, his 1974 blender-spin of 20th-century revolutionaries who all lived in Zurich in 1917. James Joyce, writing Ulysses; Tristan Tzara, developing dada; and Vladimir Lenin, receiving news of a distant…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 15, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, James Joyce, Henry Carr, Tristan Tzara, Tom Stoppard
Culture,
Stage
Thornton Wilder's folksy play about Grovers Corners (actually Peterborough), N.H., has a dark undertow of protest that makes it relevant in wartime: At least one of the town boys will die in the First World War. But the play isn't…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 15, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Thornton Wilder, Grovers Corners, Peterborough, Emily Webb
Culture,
Stage
Charlie Varon has revived and revamped his hilarious 1994 solo tour de force, a satire that may owe more than a little to Tom Stoppard's Travesties (see above), about Rush Limbaugh and a cast of mostly still-relevant national figures from…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 15, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Rush Limbaugh, Charlie Varon, Tom Stoppard, Garrison Keillor
Culture,
Stage
Ever since Alice Walker found a certain unmarked grave in Florida 31 years ago, Zora Neale Hurston has enjoyed the sort of career that the literary world of the 1930s and '40s -- both in midtown Manhattan and in Harlem…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 8, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Dorothy Waring, Zora Neale Hurston, Leafy Lee, Alice Walker
Culture,
Stage
The Berkeley-based Riot Group has been hiding from local audiences for the last few years, not just in La Val's Subterranean Theatre, but also in New York, London, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Pugilist Specialist is the group's latest Edinburgh…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 8, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Berkeley, Adriano Shaplin, London, Edinburgh Festival Fringe
Culture,
Stage
"Trampolina, you can't go around making comments about Hitler like that," says Winnie, the mainstay of the Kinsey Sicks, San Francisco's homegrown a-cappella-group-in-drag. "Imagine the Führer." Winnie and friends wait for guests to come to their…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 8, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Adolf Hitler, San Francisco, Jeff Manabat, Irwin Keller
Culture,
Stage
"I have a building over on Park," says Bill Hayes, a high-powered managing agent for exclusive Manhattan apartment buildings, who looks like a corporate lawyer and talks with the bluff seriousness of a yuppie playing golf, "that has a rule…
by Michael Scott Moore
December 1, 2004
Tags: Stage, Stage, Charles Grodin, Bill Hayes, Frank Rashman, Manhattan
