KPFA - Bay Area Theater

Mona Golabek is bringing her one-woman show, The Pianist of Willisden Lane, which was adapted and directed by Hershey Felder, to TheaterWorks in Mountain View, from January 15th through February 16, 2020. This interview conducted by Richard Wolinsky was recorded in 2013 when The Pianist of Wilisden Lane was produced by Berkeley Rep. Performing the story of her mother, a piano prodigy who escaped from Austria to England in 1938 on the Kindertransport and the years afterward as a refugee, Mona Golabek weaves the narrative with performances of the music that kept her mother alive, both as listener and performer. The play is based on her book The Children of Willisden Lane.

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KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky reviews “Becky Nurse of Salem” at Berkeley Rep‘s Peets Theatre through January 26, 2020.

Text of review (audio is slightly different and has actuality from Sarah Ruhl)

The notion of witch hunt as metaphor comes from Arthur Miller’s play “The Crucible,” which translated what happened in Salem in 1693 to the story of McCarthyism and those accused during the darkest days of the Red Scare in the late 1940s into the 1950’s.

But while “witch hunt” is a perfectly fine metaphor, if abused by the absurdity in the White House, the real witch hunt was something else again, part of a war against sexuality and particularly, a war against women – something Miller himself stayed away from in his famous play.

Playwright Sarah Ruhl tackles that aspect of the witch trials, and their contemporary meaning, in a crackling new play, “Becky Nurse of Salem,” which is enjoying its world premiere run at Berkeley Rep through January 26th.

Becky Nurse of Salem didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because Sarah felt she had to write something about the times we live in.

And that got her thinking about Arthur Miller’s The Crucible

Sarah Ruhl had these two ideas. How, then, to put them together?

Becky Nurse is a complex character, not villain nor hero. Very smart, very astute and also very blind to what’s going on around her.

It’s a tough role, one that Pamela Reed takes and makes her own, a blindingly real person attempting to deal with the struggles of an out of work single woman raising a rebellious granddaughter with ideas of her own. But the entire cast takes Sarah Ruhl’s words and runs with them. The show is a brilliant tour de force by all concerned, convincingly directed by Anne Kaufman.

As a world premiere, the script could use tightening, mostly in the second act, and clarity over the time frame would probably be in order. But this is Sarah Ruhl at her finest, and most astute, and Becky Nurse of Salem is a brilliant play – thought-provoking, very funny, with something to chew on in nearly every single scene.

BeckyNurse of Salem by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Anne Kauffman, plays at Berkeley Rep’s Peets Theatre through January 26th. For more information you can go to Berkely rep. org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for KPFA.

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A conversation with John Skelley (Harry Potter), Yanna McIntosh (Hermoine) and David Abeles (Ron), from the production of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a sequel to the Harry Potter books and films, playing in two parts at the Curran in San Francisco, hosted by Richard Wolinsky.

With a story by J.K. Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, written by Jack Thorne and directed by John Tiffany, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” takes place as Harry, Ron and Hermoine are approaching forty years of age, and their children (Harry is married to Ron’s sister Ginny) are now going to Hogwarts School for Magicians.

John Skelley, Yanna McIntosh and David Abeles have all been acting in theatre, film and television for the past several years. John Skelley and David Abeles understudied their roles in the Broadway production, and the Canadian Yanna McIntosh is new to the role in San Francisco. They discuss their visions of the roles and the play, and how they prepare as actors.

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Noted playwright Sarah Ruhl, whose latest work “Becky Nurse of Salem” is having its premiere at Berkeley Rep through January 26, 2020, is interviewed by Richard Wolinsky.

Sarah Ruhl’s plays, The Clean House and In The Next Room (The Vibrator Play) have both been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and In The Next Room was also nominated for a Tony. In 2008 she received the Helen Hayes award for Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and has written the screenplay for a new film about Gloria Steinem, The Glorias directed by Julie Taymore. Sarah Ruhl has also written a collection of essays published in 2015 and Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, published in 2018. A collection, 44 Poems for You, will be published in February, 2020.

From the Berkeley Rep website:

Becky Nurse is an outspoken, sharp-witted tour guide at the Salem Museum of Witchcraft who’s just trying to get by in post-Obama America. She’s also the descendant of Rebecca Nurse, who was infamously executed for witchcraft in 1692—but things have changed for women since then…haven’t they? After losing her job for calling out The Crucible in front of schoolkids, Becky visits a local witch for help. One spell leads to another, and then everything really goes off the rails.

Becky Nurse of Salem was commissioned by Berkeley Rep and developed in The Ground Floor: Berkeley Rep’s Center for the Creation and Development of New Work.

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KPFA theatre critic Richard Wolinsky reviews a new musical adaptation of “Pride & Prejudice” at TheatreWorks Lucie Stern Theater in Palo Alto through January 4, 2020.

TheatreWorks website

Text of review (audio is slightly different).

Jane Austen only wrote six complete books, yet over two centuries since her death, she has become one of the most popular best-selling authors. There have at least seventeen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, including six miniseries, and a variety of films, from the direct to the indirect, including Bridget Jones’ Diary and, god help us, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Plus at least four musical adaptations, the most recent of which is a world premiere, with book, music and lyrics by Paul Gordon, which can be seen at Theatreworks’ Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto through January 4th.

It’s, set in Regency England. The Bennet family has five daughters, the eldest Jane a beauty, the next in line, Elizabeth, proud and smart. For girls, the only step to take when of age is marriage, most preferably to a man of property. A love match is fine, but security is what counts. Jane has someone she dotes on, and Elizabeth …well, you take what you can get. And then there’s that rude Mr. Darcy.

What makes Pride and Prejudice so special. One element is Elizabeth, our heroine, the archetypal proto feminist, standing up for herself, speaking her mind, and damn the consequences. The other is her complicated relationship with Mr. Darcy. He turns her off at the start, and then of course things change. In the end, Pride and Prejudice is the first, maybe still the greatest, rom com of all time.

With an emphasis on the status of women in a patriarchal society, the story functions as a social satire of class, and above all, manners. And it’s that angle, the manners, that makes Pride and Prejudice a perfect target for a musical.

What Pride and Prejudice does, in effect, is create a distance between what’s going on in the world, and what’s going on in people’s heads, and what better way to examine the latter than through songs that comment on the former? Which is what Paul Gordon’s Pride and Prejudice does to great effect. As we see the action, we learn what’s going on in everyone’s head.

The songs sometimes veer toward folk or light pop, but they never stray too far out of the period. Mary Mattison is particularly good as Elizabeth, and the strong voiced Justin Mortelliti offers a Darcy who matches her particularly well. Less successful are the subplots, which all get jammed in, willy nilly. Trying to cram everything in might satisfy the purists, but musical theatre has different priorities.

Still, it’s a lovely chamber musical, with a sweet score, a fine cast, an excellent all round production. This latest Pride and Prejudice is no classic, but it’s a charming night in the theatre.

Pride and Prejudice, a musical by Paul Gordon, directed by Robert Kelley, plays at theatreworks Lucie Stern Theatre through January 4th. For more information you can go to theatreworks.org. I’m Richard Wolinsky on Bay Area theatre for kPFA.

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