SF Playhouse is all in with their take on Tony Award winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist David Henry Hwang‘s Chinglish: stylish set and lighting, excellent direction, and a strong ensemble cast. While there’s plenty of comic moments in Hwang’s sardonic commentary on language barriers and the effects of those miscommunications, there’s also thoughtful observations...
Review: S.F. Playhouse’s ‘Chinglish,’ Directed by Jeffrey Lo, is plump to bursting with jokes about what gets lost in translation
The best comedic writers are like symphony composers. They prick and pique your ears. They establish conditions that make you crave exactly what they’re going to give you — tonic chord, development, discord, resolution — with the perfect number of rat-a-tat beats preceding a ker-splat punch line. One more syllable, and the whole thing would...
Review: LIKE HEAVEN at The Bridge Initiative, written by Elaine Romero
Since its founding in 2014 by Tracy Liz Miller and Brenda Jean Foley, The Bridge Initiative has been a consistent and ardent champion of diversity and community-building. As a women-led artistic collective, they have stayed true to their vision ~ “an equitable industry where women and other groups who have historically been denied access...
When the Process Is the Problem
When playwright Mashuq Mushtaq Deen resigned from his residency at New Dramatists in August 2022 and published an open letter on his website explaining the reason for his decision, he expressed hope that his experience would serve as a cautionary tale for the larger theatre community, and that talking about it might prevent similar...
‘Opera for All’ Maryland Opera Studio to Perform Contemporary Works in Weekend Dedicated to Female Composers ‘Opera for All’
From Claudio Monteverdi to Benjamin Britten, the classical music canon’s best-known opera composers tend to have one thing in common: They’re men. This weekend, the University of Maryland’s Maryland Opera Studio (MOS) presents new works by New York-based female composers Justine F. Chen and Missy Mazzoli. Though both operas take on timeless themes—including love,...