Second Row Center Blog
A little emotion goes a long way. And music is one of the best communicators of emotion, as Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and Billy Joel can tell you. The richer the music, the deeper the emotional response to it. Which is why emotions combined with music can be so powerful, and so dangerous. When 2005’s The …
Continue reading ““The Light in the Piazza” – October 14, 2015″
Oh, the glory of the human voice. And the power of the human mind to hear one’s own voice, and somehow experience it as beautiful when to other’s it’s . . . not. Not Beautiful. Not even good. Which brings us to Florence Foster Jenkins. That’s her we are listening to now, from a recording …
A story is an illusion, a series of events that are not really taking place, presented in a way that fools its audience into believing, for a moment, that it is all really happening. Telling that story in a book or movie is a certain kind of trick, with its own rules and traditions, and …
Continue reading ““Treasure Island” and “Amelie” – September 30, 2015″
In Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” the indelible Kate and Petruchio—a feisty, ferocious fiancé and her would-be “tamer”—together discover something truly amazing and surprising. They discover that even after 400 years, people will see a show about two people fighting with each other until they finally fall in love. Kate and Petruchio are amongst …
Continue reading ““The Taming of the Shrew” – August 26, 2015”
“Oh, what fools these mortal’s be!” “The course of true love never did run smooth.” “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.” There are a lot of great lines in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but one of my favorites comes close to the end. It’s a theater review, of sorts. Having …
Continue reading ““A Midsummer Night’s Dream” – August 12, 2015″
Last week—in my report on Dezi Gallegos’ new show, ‘Yesterday Again’—I spent a lot of time talking about newness, originality, world premieres, fresh spins on old themes… You know.. Stuff we haven’t seen before. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, in part because this week marks the one-year-anniversary of my trip to …
Continue reading “Maintaining That Festival State-Of-Mind – August 5, 2015”
It’s a mystery, a challenge, a puzzle, a conundrum. How do you keep theater alive and interesting, when the majority of your audience has proven their relative preference for familiar shows, revivals of familiar shows, and shows based on familiar movies or T.V. programs, and takes a wait-and-see attitude when presented with a play that …
It is better, they say, to give than to receive. That must be why so many groups gather so often to give so many awards to so many people for their efforts in so many different art forms connected to so many different award-worthy fields of endeavor. Though most people in show business are buzzing …
Continue reading “The Sonoma County Stage One Theatre Arts Awards – July 22, 2015”
For those who prefer not to travel far for their onstage entertainment, and like to avoid any excursions into foreign territory, there are, fortunately, a tremendous number of nearby theater companies. But for those who like experiencing the new and exotic, and don’t mind working a bit to get there, may I suggest a trip …
“Twelfth Night” is amongst Shakespeare’s most popular plays, in part because the story is so accessible, and the situations so universally funny. Typical of the Bard, humor and tragedy are never far from each other. A young woman, Viola, grieves for her twin brother Sebastian after surviving a shipwreck in which she believes he drowned. …